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Originally Posted by Digital_Trucker
 Shoulda looked a little closer at the original files. Evidently, when I used my spreadsheet program (OpenOffice) to edit the file once upon a time, it decided that the text fields in the CSV file needed quotation marks (") around them. I never noticed the change because all the other commands worked fine. The problem evidently only arises with those commands that can have a negative sign (hyphen,-) in front of their entries to designate direction. Everything should be hunky-dory after I strip out the quotes 
Don't know if it's even worth thinking about, but if this could be a common problem with spreadsheet programs, maybe a mention in the readme would help some other poor slob (i.e. me) not make the same mistake.
As for the answers to all your above questions: the same exact thing,yes,no,yes.
Enjoy your camping trip (and if you see this afterwards, I hope you enjoyed it)  |
Digital Trucker:
Apparently, OpenOffice is treating the negative number as text because, strictly speaking, the "minus" sign isn't a numeric character) and putting it in quotation marks. Putting text in quotes is standard CSV convention because the text itself may contain a comma, which would mess up the way the file was decoded. The quotation marks tell the CSV decoder to treat everything in between as one field. As for the reason *why* OpenOffice is treating a negative number as a string, well... I guess you gotta ask the authors of the project about that one...
Bill