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Author Topic: French accents not exporting properly  (Read 4663 times)

mcnamedia

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French accents not exporting properly
December 09, 2008, 08:05:07 am
Hi folks,

From what I can gather, UTF-8 should handle all accents without problem. Within CiviCRM, I can see all the accents just fine. However, if I export to .csv, the accents are replaced by other characters.

Anyone else run into this problem?

Thanks,
Greg

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Re: French accents not exporting properly
December 09, 2008, 08:49:44 am
Hi Greg,
   What are you using to look at your export file? The reason I ask is that we have a database that has contacts from Geneva Switzerland. Some of these contacts have special characters in their name. I exported one of these contacts to a csv file. If I look at the file with either Excel or Wordpad, the special characters are not translated properly: they appear as "garbage". If I look at the same file with notepad, the name looks fine and all the special characters appear as they should.
   We are using Drupal. If the above is not at all helpful, perhaps this will help, although it is an issue about importing which is not your issue, but it does involve Joomla and character sets: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,1136.0.html.

Cynthia

mcnamedia

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Re: French accents not exporting properly
December 09, 2008, 09:00:24 am
Thanks Cynthia, I'm using Excel to view the exported .csv. I'm using Joomla 1.5 and all my settings are set to UTF-8 so I will try the notepad. If that works, then there must be some way to open them in excel and not have the issues. I'll post my findings.

Thanks,
Greg

mcnamedia

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Re: French accents not exporting properly
December 09, 2008, 09:30:04 am
Ok yeah, if I export my data to .csv, open in notepad and save as ascii, I can then open the file in Excel. Thanks Cynthia!!

Since I doubt anyone's clients are going to like this method though (mine aren't particular about it), I'll try to find a solution and post.

Greg

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Re: French accents not exporting properly
December 13, 2008, 04:34:41 am
Quote
The reason I ask is that we have a database that has contacts from Geneva Switzerland. Some of these contacts have special characters in their name.

They aren't special, just that the 7bit ascii is too limited ;)

Ok, I suggest you to use openoffice, both because that's open source (good for your karma), and because it offers to choose the charset when importing from csv, so you can actually say that's utf8 (good for your nerves).

Excel is highly creative about what char it uses for column separator (either "," or ";") and charset, based on the location, language, version and phase of the moon (not quite sure about the last one, might be a more random source that they use). There is a setting on the latest version of civicrm to set the separator, be sure it's ";" if you use a French version of excel, works better.

Bonne chance!

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This forum was archived on 2017-11-26.