[Plugin: WP-Table Reloaded] Strange import

Hi Tom,

thanks for your post.

Very likely this is a problem with the character encoding. I have noticed in the past, that certain characters (e.g. from foreign languages) seem to cause trouble with some PHP functions.

This happens, when the plugin can’t read the table data correctly from the database, which usually happens during the saving of the imported data.
While the initial import works, the ensuing saving fails, very likely to a problem with the character encoding.
I was not yet able to find a definite cause or a solution, but usually this helps:
Check the CSV file (in a text editor) for “special” characters.
This means for example quotation marks or apostrophes that are not exactly the ones from the keyboard, but more typographically nice ones (i.e. the sometimes look more like an accent ′ instead of an apostrophe '). Then replace those by the “regular” characters.
It could also help to open the CSV file in Notepad and then “Save as” with a different “Character Encoding” selected

After that the import and saving process should work as expected and the table should appear fine on the page.

Regards,
Tobias

Many thanks – changing encoding from ANSI to UTF worked fine. I had checked for strange characters – and couldn’t find any.

Interestingly the first line contains field names and all came in correct – but the first one came in with the Inverted Commas – ie in the table there was

“Firstname”
Surname
DOB

etc

Easy to edit out of course

Hope this helps track it down or helps someone else

Thanks again

Tom

Hi Tom,

awesome! Thanks for the hints! Yes, UTF-8 is a much better encoding than ANSI for this purpose. Great that this worked!

Best wishes,
Tobias

Tobias

Really odd – I edited the csv file and took out the inverted commas around the first field name – thinking that it would not import properly – but it did, and did not place the inverted commas around the first field name in the resulting table. All the other field names have inverted commas in the CSV file – but import properly (without them)

As it is easier to do it in the CSV file than in WordPress (only because the table is sufficiently big that editing/updating takes a while)

Anyway – again, hope this helps

Tom

Hi Tom,

with “inverted commas”, do you mean quotes?
Those are used as “escaping characters” in CSV, and are sometimes necessary to clearly define the content of a cell.
If the cell content is just a single word, they are not necessary, so yeah, removing them beforehand is fine.

Regards,
Tobias

Tobias – yes!

I just found it a bit odd that the first cell (ie Row 1 column 1) imported and kept the quotes, when all the other cells did not (which is what I expected).

But anyway, as I said, easy to edit and I appreciate they are not really needed if the content is a single word – in our case it was “FIRSTNAME” – but would have been needed if I’d used “First Name”

Thanks again

Tom

Hi Tom,

yes, it’s indeed a little bit odd that they are not removed in that first cell. Likely this is an issue in the underlying library that WP-Table Reloaded uses for this.

Actually, “First Name” without quotes should be fine as well, just e.g. “First,Name” would cause trouble without quotes.

Best wishes,
Tobias