Problems parsing CSV file

  • Resolved mgincnj

    (@mgincnj)


    12 years, 3 months ago

    Tobias…

    First, thanks for continuing to support TablePress! It’s a great plugin.

    I have an application I’m building for a client, who will be maintaining a table containing a bunch of text (that includes single quotes, double quotes and other special characters). They’ll be maintaining it in Excel, and periodically uploading it to WordPress, replacing the current table with an updated one.

    I originally started building this app in WP-Tables Reloaded, and the CSV file I was using seemed to load fine. Now, with TablePress, it bombs routinely. The only application seems to create the proper escape sequences is if I load the spreadsheet file into MySql, and export to CSV for Excel. However, I’ve tried creating CSV files using the following other permutations, none of which work with my data file:

    — Microsoft Excel 2003 on XP
    — Microsoft Excel 2007 on Windows 7
    — Open Office 3.3 on Windows 7
    — Microsoft Excel 2008 on Mac

    The client is a non-profit with old computers: still running Windows XP and Excel 2003. Ideally, I’m hoping you can make that combo work. I’m happy to send you samples of files from all of these spreadsheet systems that bomb TablePress (as well as the one that’s OK) if you’d like.

    Thanks,
    Michael

    https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/tablepress/

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Plugin Author Tobias B?thge

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi Michael,

    thanks for your post. Sorry for the troubles, that you are experiencing!

    Yes, please send me some sample files:
    – the original Excel file (so that I can see how the table data is supposed to look like)
    – and some samples of the CSV files that the various applications export, maybe even with some description of what you already found about what is or looks wrong in them.

    You can find my email address in the main plugin file “tablepress.php”.

    And: Do you get any error messages during the import? If not on the screen, maybe in the server error log?

    Thanks!
    Tobias

    Plugin Author Tobias B?thge

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    just for everybody following this thread:
    I worked on this with Michael directly, and we found that the character encoding of the CSV files plays an important role in this.
    It is recommended to convert all CSV files to “UTF-8” character encoding (if they don’t yet use that), before importing the file into TablePress. This can for example be achieved with Notepad on Windows, or TextWrangler on Mac.

    Best wishes,
    Tobias

    Thanks TobiasBg and Michael. Great Work.

    I had the same problem when importing a file. Csv excel. I converted with notepad ANSI to UTF-8 as you say and it works fantastically. Thank you very much and congratulations for the great work and support you give to this plugin. Greetings. And sorry for my poor English I am Spanish.

    Plugin Author Tobias B?thge

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi runmusic,

    thanks a lot for also testing this, and for confirming that it worked!

    In the next version of TablePress, I will have made some changes so that ANSI is (hopefully) recognized automatically, so that this manual step with changing the encoding to UTF-8 should then no longer be necessary ??

    Best wishes,
    Tobias

    Thread Starter mgincnj

    (@mgincnj)

    Tobias…
    Just an quick update. I delivered the application to the client and trained him to upload a csv file to TablePress. He’s running Excel 2003 on a Windows XP system (not on a Mac virtual machine as my test environment was). We still had encoding problems. It was fixed by loading the file into notepad and saving it UTF-8 as we’d previously worked out.

    My only point for writing is to underscore the importance of the enhancement you’re planning to do. Us Mac users are used to having to do odd things from time to time to live with the dominant platforms. But my client is running a mainstream platform (if now a little dated) and is used to everything working. If he’s having problems, I suspect many other people would as well.

    Again, thanks for your support through this! I’m a big fan of TablePress and you.

    Plugin Author Tobias B?thge

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    yes, I totally agree! Fixing this character encoding issue is very important.
    Unfortunately, character encoding is one of the more tricky topics, and there’s no “will-always-work” approach or solution to it ??

    But I hope that my fix will make this much better and robust ??
    It will be part of TablePress 0.9.

    Best wishes,
    Tobias

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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