Apostrophes in CSV file

[Tommy]

Hello I installed the event calendar pro for my client. She runs a local magazine website and uploads events to the site calendar and she has emailed me about a problem that she seems to be having where there are some venues with an apostrophe in the name and for some reason when she uploads it to the site it seems to not upload the venue name with the apostrophe. The problem I’m having is when I tried to replicate this problem it seems to work for me. I have an example file that you can look at and see if there is something they are doing that causes this problem. In the file you can see that the venues are capitalized and what I did was lowercase the venues and when I upload it everything went fine. So I don’t know if its the use of Excel with the files and they need to use possibly Google Sheets instead or there is something in the plugin that is making this happen but I wanted to reach out and see if you have any possible idea with what is happening.

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Tommy and welcome to the Events Calendar Support forum!

Thank you for reaching out to us.

We are sorry to hear about the issues you are experiencing with your imports
I would love to help you with this topic.

I would recommend the following:

1. Make sure the file is encoded UTF-8 (and not Mac OS roman).
2. To tackle entries with ‘ , it’s best to surround them with quotation marks in your file.

E.g.: “test2’s company”, first2, last2

Let me know if that helps.

Have a great day!

Geoff B.

[Tommy]

Hello again, so I tried uploading a test csv file using the suggestions you gave. I took a template and just had one event with a venue that has an apostrophe in the name and at first it seemed to work but I tried it again with a different venue name and it doesn’t upload the event with the venue, it’s just the event name, date, time, etc. So it seems to be a problem with not all the venues will upload the same even though they are put practically the same just some venue names with an apostrophe will upload no problem and others don’t. This has been a constant problem that has been brought up multiple by my client so while she can in the venue by going to the event edit page and adding it in that way she wonders why this keeps happening over and over again.

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Tommy,

I apologize for the delay answering, this is caused by national holidays in the Canada and US.

Thank you for writing back.

I tried uploading a test csv file using the suggestions you gave. I took a template and just had one event with a venue that has an apostrophe in the name and at first it seemed to work but I tried it again with a different venue name and it doesn’t upload the event with the venue, it’s just the event name, date, time, etc.

Would you mind sending me those exact examples ? I do believe your results, but I’m thinking that 2 heads are probably better than 1 when it comes to troubleshooting.

I am truly sorry that this seems to be a recurring issue with your clients.

The good news is that in every case I have seen so far, it has always been possible to solve these issue (after examination of the csv file).

So the more examples that don’t work, the better (so that I can test them and figure out what the issue is).

Best regards,

Geoff B.

[Tommy]

Hello Geoff, I uploaded a couple more files for you.

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Tommy,

Thank you for the files.

I took a look at them and based on what I have observed, they still contain plenty of apostrophes (‘).
The issue is that single quotation marks are also used as a separator in CSV files.

As you can imagine, on a computer screen apostrophes and single quotation marks will look identical.

For that reason, you will want every field containing them to be contained in quotation marks.

E.g.:  HUMPHREY’S (SEE AD PG.) should read “HUMPHREY’S (SEE AD PG.)”

This is a good practice to suggest to your client for smoother imports.

Let me know if that helps.

Have a great day!

Geoff B.

[Tommy]

Hello again, so I tried the quotation marks like you mention and it would still not take the name and it would leave it blank when the csv file is imported and I looked at the event and the venue name is left blank. I even tried it with one event and it still didn’t work for me.

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Tommy,

I am sorry that this did not work out for you.
That lead me to run several extra tests.

As I suspected, in your files, the apostrophe is actually a single quotation mark (‘) and not a real apostrophe (’).

But no matter what I tried (replacing with real apostrophes or using double-quotation marks and even with no special character) I had the exact same issue as you did: the venue name did not import.

Then I remembered that the code is trying to match against an existing venue name. So I went ahead and created a venue csv file import first (as recommended here: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/using-the-events-calendars-csv-importer/)

I did that using the format recommended from the example file found here: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/csv-files-options-and-examples/#field-type-string

Once I did that as a first step, everything else worked smoothly upon my next events import and the venue name was systematically imported correctly, no matter how it was spelled.

Let me know if that helps.

Have a great day!

Geoff B.

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

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