Author Topic: Importing falls short - non printable characters halting import - solution (Read 733 times)

jwittkam · October 01, 2013, 02:13:47 pm

I installed CiviCRM a few weeks ago and have been migrating a lot of data into it. I had thousands of contacts (from around the world) and my imports kept cutting short over and over again on contacts that had certain foreign non-printable characters in them. The data was collected from a web form with no limitations on what data was allowed inside.

The CiviCRM import wizard kept choking. I discovered that if I bring my files into Notepad++ first and use the TextFX feature to "Zap all non printable characters" then it cuts out the problematic fields and makes it possible to import all records.

I found myself using this feature of Notepad++ over and over again, so I thought I would put a mention of it here in the CiviCRM forum.

JonGold · October 01, 2013, 02:50:28 pm

Thank you for this tip!

In my experience, CiviCRM can handle all different character sets - so if it's choking on a character, it's either a) a true non-printable character (meaning a control character), or b) there was a character encoding issue. Converting file encodings to UTF-8 before importing to CiviCRM is a big help when dealing with non-Roman alphabets!

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Author Topic: Importing falls short - non printable characters halting import - solution (Read 733 times)

jwittkam

Importing falls short - non printable characters halting import - solution

JonGold

Re: Importing falls short - non printable characters halting import - solution