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When importing data from a CSV file, special or International characters (e.g. è, é, ê...) are not visible or incorrect
When importing data from a CSV file, special or International characters (e.g. è, é, ê...) are not visible or incorrect
Bryan Nye avatar
Written by Bryan Nye
Updated over a week ago

It is important to ensure that your CSV file is encoded with the Unicode UTF-8 Internet standard character set for international and special characters so they are rendered properly in browsers worldwide.

Here's an example where a CSV with special characters wasn't encoded in UTF-8. This is how the location's name would appear within MetaLocator when imported.

Unfortunately Microsoft Excel is known to save CSV files in different encodings which differ by Office version and operating system.  

Current versions of Excel have this option to save the file in UTF-8 format.

For prior versions not offering this option, we usually steer our international users away from relying solely on Excel to import and export data, though it can be done with careful use.

For example: In Excel 2007, in the "Save As" window, click the Tools button.  From there, choose Web options, Encoding tab.  Select Unicode (UTF-8) from the "Save this Document as"

Another tool to use is Google Spreadsheet (which is similar to Excel, free and Web-based).

To change a CSV file to use UTF-8 encoding with Google Spreadsheets, follow these steps:

  1. Create a new, empty Google Spreadsheet by following the link above.

  2. Choose File, Import from the Google Spreadsheet menu, and choose Upload, then select your CSV file from your computer.

  3. Choose File, Download As...,Comma Separated Values (csv)

The resulting file will be a correctly formatted CSV file with all characters properly encoded.

 

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