Problems importing Alias using ASCII importer

AmiBroker
1

Hello, I am having an issue with importing Alias name using the ASCII importer and format file.
Not all tickers have an Alias and therefore for those tickers it is empty in the .txt file.
You see from the screenshots that for the tickers which have an Alias in the .txt file, then the Alias field is correct. For tickers that do not have a Alias in the .txt file, then the Alias is filled with the Alias from the previous preceeding ticker.

I do not know what is incorrect with my Format file and where my error is.

Here is an extract of my .txt file which is imported:
Ticker,DMY,Open,High,Low,Close,Volume,Fullname,Alias

W0LGEWV;02/04/2020;25.1400;26.4400;23.7600;24.6600;286833;Hella KGaA Hueck & Co.;HLE.DE
IA0HN5C;02/04/2020;35.0000;35.1900;33.9300;34.5000;1337722;Deutsche Wohnen AG;
I515710;02/04/2020;29.0000;32.0000;27.7000;30.9500;31926;Dr. Hoenle AG;HNL.DE
I522720;02/04/2020;20.4000;20.4000;19.5000;19.7000;9609;Biotest;

This is my import format file

# Format definition file generated automatically
# by AmiBroker's ASCII Import Wizard
$FORMAT Ticker, Date_DMY, Open, High, Low, Close, Volume, FullName, Alias
$SKIPLINES 0
$SEPARATOR ;
$AUTOADD 1
$OVERWRITE 1
$CONT 1
$DEBUG 0
# $GROUP 201

Here are screenshots of my results from the Information window;

2020-04-24_01-22-49
2020-04-24_01-23-14
2020-04-24_01-23-48
2020-04-24_01-24-11

2

@maccra, is there any way you can "fix" your input file?

For tickers that don't have an Alias, can you add another ";" , or as an alternative add " ;", so there is an actual value to input into the database?

I would suggest you try that these on a test database...

3

You could also try putting two quotes where the alias is missing. Or try using {EMPTY}.

However, this will not fix the bad aliases that are in your DB now because the ASCII importer will not wipe out an alias to replace it with a blank value, if I understand it correctly.

You could also consider using JavaScript to read the file and modify each alias.

4

@snoopy.pa30, @PeterD Thank you both for your sugestions. In the end I added the Separator ";" at the end of each line of the input file. The input file is exported from another software and so this was the easiest and consistent solution.

My input file now looks like this:

W0LGEWV;02/04/2020;25.1400;26.4400;23.7600;24.6600;286833;Hella KGaA Hueck & Co.;HLE.DE;
IA0HN5C;02/04/2020;35.0000;35.1900;33.9300;34.5000;1337722;Deutsche Wohnen AG;;
I515710;02/04/2020;29.0000;32.0000;27.7000;30.9500;31926;Dr. Hoenle AG;HNL.DE;
I522720;02/04/2020;20.4000;20.4000;19.5000;19.7000;9609;Biotest;;

@PeterD You are right about the cleaning of the database. There is only about 400 symbols so I decided to do this manually and delete the Alias from each symbol before I reimported the input file. It didn't really take that long to do.

I read the User Manual and looked at the examples and could not find the requirement that I needed to have a Separator at the end of the line. I am still curious if this is expected behaviour because I can not see the logic is this type of behaviour.

Thanks for the support

5

You don't need separator at the end of the line. But the number of fields in the data should match the number of fields in $Format that you specified.