CSV Export – Problems with umlauts

[websource]

Hi there

When exporting the csv which contains umlauts the export contains strings like below !

Thanks
Brian

[websource]

This reply is private.

[websource]

This reply is private.

[websource]

This reply is private.

[Andras]

Hello Brian,

Thanks for reaching out with your question!

I have experienced this with some other plugins. Please give me some time to test this and check with the team, and I’ll get back to you asap.

Meanwhile, please be so kind and share your sysinfo with me. (https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/sharing-sys-info/)

Thanks and cheers,
Andras

[Andras]

A workaround for the moment, if you are using Excel, is the following:

1. When exporting the CSV, then save the file.
2. Open Excel with a blank spreadsheet
3. Go to the Data menu (whatever it is called now) and choose Get External Data > From Text (https://cloudup.com/c8yfu1xTig8)
4. In the Import Text File dialog choose the saved CSV
5. On the first screen of the import wizard choose UTF-8 as the File origin. (It’s close to the end of the list. https://cloudup.com/cO0BAMupvHX)
6. Finish the other two steps of the wizard (the delimiter is usually comma (,) )

Let me know if this solves it for ya.

Thanks and cheers,
Andras

[websource]

Hi Andras
Thanks for your answer, your workaround works of course!
Hope you^ll get some fix soon. Thanks

Brian

[Andras]

Hi Brian,

Had some discussions with the team and was checking also around. This looks like a generic _issue_, not related to our plugins. As I meantioned, I also had this with WooCommerce export.

It seems to depend on the encoding used by your database. I believe WordPress uses by default UTF-8 (now switching to utf8mb4) because that covers basically all character sets around the world. This is why the CSV exports also have UTF8 encoding.

I also found another workaround for the issue. Open the CSV file in Notepad, then do a Save As… and choose ANSI as Encoding. Then open it with Excel and it should be fine. You can try this as well.

I hope this helps and I’m sorry I cannot give you an automatic solution. At the moment that is not possible.

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Cheers,
Andras

[Andras]

One more, you can use Google Sheets, open the file there. It automatically recognizes the utf8 encoding so you don’t need to do anything with the file beforehand.

Cheers,
Andras

[websource]

Hi Andras

thanks for the following up and another solution as a workaround.
i just quickly checked what db collocation my db uses: its => InnoDB utf8mb4_unicode_ci

as you are saving your attendees data into default wp-tables this should be fine, if i understand you correctly?

What would you suggest – waiting for a fix on the side of wordpress?

thanks
brian

[Andras]

Hey Brian,

Yeah, the utf8mb4_unicode_ci is the new recommended standard / default by WordPress to cover the needs of all character sets.

I’m not sure this will be fixed or that this needs a fix. Simply, the CSV data that gets exported is using utf8 encoding (like the database). And Excel is using something else, which cannot be changed (yet). That is the source of the problem.

You can try using a different encoding in your database, if that helps. I’m not sure, I haven’t tested it.

Other than that you will have to use one of the workarounds.

Until now I’ve been using the Excel Get External Data one. I recently figured a slightly different way which also might help you out. It only needs that you save your export always with the same file name to the same location.

Here’s how this works:

1. New blank Excel file
2. Data > New Query > From file > From CSV
3. Choose the file
4. In the dialog choose utf8 as your encoding (plus whatever other setting you need) and click load.
5. This will create a nice table for you.
6. Next time when you do an export, save it with the same filename as before and overwrite the file
7. Open your excel file which you created previously
8. Go to Data > Refresh All > Refresh (on the sheet where you have the table)
9. The new data should automatically be imported (overwrites the previous data) and should have the proper formatting as it was already set to utf8.

You can have a template excel file, which you open, refresh, then save under a different name if needed. This way you will always have the template excel linked to that csv file.

Note that I don’t know what happens 1) if you delete the csv file; 2) move the excel file to a different folder. 🙂 I haven’t tested that. So most probably I would do a copy -> paste values before, to remove the link to the csv file.

For me this solution works at the moment, because I don’t need to save the old exports, I always just need the newest one.

If you need to save all exports, then probably I would go for opening in notepad and re-saving with the ansi encoding. Then you’re set.

I hope this helps!

Cheers,
Andras

 

[websource]

Hi Andras
Thanks for helping out here..
I can live with the workaround so far, but is there any possibility that this gets fixed from you?
Or are you using some wordpress functions for the export?

Thanks
Brian

[Andras]

Hi Brian,

Since this is 1) not really an issue, I mean the data is encoded in UTF8 in the database and that is what you get as an export, 2) not specifically The Events Calendar related (other plugins suffer from the same issue), I believe we are not going to release a fix for this. This is rather a limitation of sort of Microsoft Excel.

We are using the export just the same way as you are. And we utilize one of the 4 the workarounds.

Once again, the workarounds are:

• Excel > Get external data
• Excel > New Query
• Re-save in Notepad with ANSI encoding (you can also use Notepad++ > Encoding > Convert to ANSI)
• Open with Google Sheets
• I believe Libre Office or some other free office suite is also using utf8, so this would be a similar alternative like Google Sheets

I hope this clarifies.

Cheers,
Andras

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

Posts