Help with CSV File, WP and Encoding.
 

Was wondering if anyone could shed some light here.

I have several spreadsheets of data (csv files) that I have been modifying, then trying to incorporate into my WP blog using the plugin wpallimport. My troubleshooting leads me to believe that some issue is occurring once I save the newly modified csv.

When I upload the csv to be parsed through the plugin, the columns/nodes containing foreign language characters display as either "???????" or they cannot be read and are seemingly omitted.

Notes:
The native csv files are encoded in UTF-8 and once I've modified them, I verify that they are still encoded that way. Even so, I still have an issue with the plugin. But here's what's interesting: if I upload the native csv file (unmodified/untouched), the plugin displays all information perfectly. Unfortunately, this won't do because I need to modify them first.

I have been using OpenOffice Calc, Microsoft Office 2010 Excel, GoogleDocs, Notepad and Notepad++ searching for a way to correct this through saving in different encoding, trying different file extensions. The wpallimport customer service never returned my email.

I'd appreciate any help and can explain further.

Thanks for your time!

issue resolved

Hi,
I was following this as I sometimes work in Turkish. I had a feeling utf-8 locally was the wrong route but can you share a little of what you did to resolve the problem?

I found an alternate way of dealing with the issue, so it's solved for the time being (but not completely as you'll see).

One thing I left out, because I wasn't sure if it'd be relevant, was that I also had the csv documents in xml format too (with UTF-8 encoding). Originally, I found the xml documents a bit harder to manipulate so I didn't bother with them. Plus, I also felt I was wasting valuable time. :Oh crap

I decided to go back to the xml documents out of frustration with the csv docs and "hoping" something different would happen. Interestingly, after tailoring the xml documents to my needs, I'm finding that the foreign characters are not creating problems after I've uploaded them using the plugin. I wish I could explain the reason for this, but I don't have a lot of experience working with these kinds of documents. The good news is, I suppose, learning from all the trial and error.

Ah Ok thanks for the feedback, as I say I thought you need to work with the CSV convert from utf-8 to HTML escaped maybe eg replace a German umlaut U with an ¨

I don't know but I have a feeling that is done for you with an XML import.