Arrays of type char should be converted to ASCII numbers when written to CSV file
This issue was created automatically from an original Mantis Issue. Further discussion may take place here.
When writing a CSV file from a data set with an array of type char, the character itself is written out the the ASCII CSV file. However, this assumes that the char values are used as actual characters, which is seldom the case. More often, these values are simply bytes often used as flags. Thus, the values have little meaning when viewed as an ASCII character and often do not fall in the region of common visible ASCII characters. Instead, the CSV writer should write out an ASCII representation of the numbers stored in the char array rather than the characters themselves.
As an example, create a plot with the Plot Over Line filter and then write out the results as a CSV file. You will notice that there is a column called vtkValidPointMask. The entries in this column are unreadable because it contains a bunch of characters without a valid ASCII representation. Instead, these values should have been converted to numbers (like 0 and 1) so that you can read it and it will be read back into ParaView as numeric values.