Product "description" Data Export

Hi, my product descriptions make good use of commas. When I export my product data, and include "description" field, the CSV file always sees the "," and causes the data to spread across several column's.

This is preventing me being able to bulk manage product descriptions.

Anyone else experienced this? and can offer any suggestions or solutions?

Thanks!

import to excel and use tab as the delimiter,

I do it all the time

hi , if you have MINIFY addon instaled in your cs-cart , uninstall the addons and test new csv export .

Hi, my product descriptions make good use of commas. When I export my product data, and include "description" field, the CSV file always sees the "," and causes the data to spread across several column's.

This is preventing me being able to bulk manage product descriptions.

Anyone else experienced this? and can offer any suggestions or solutions?

Thanks!

Use Tab delimiter instead, comma delimiter is always an issue.

Alan

I believe that the issue might be more that you are using Excel to view the CSV versus the export being bad.

By specification, any separator (comma in this case) that is enclosed in a quoted field should NOT be interpreted as as separator. I.e. a field of "This field contains a , (comma)" should be fine.

Suggest you look at your output with a text editor like wordpad to verify that the columns are quoted and that your description fields are within quotes.

Note also that double-quotes within a quoted column are escaped by preceeding it with a double-quote. I.e. "This is a ""quoted"" value within a quoted column". Which should result in This a a "quoted" value within a quoted column.

I agree with Tony, the correct format is

Product code, Description
"AA100","Lorem, ipsum, dolor sit amet"
"AA101","Lorem;!@#$%^&*()"

Hi Guys, Thanks for your suggestions.

Some clarification on some of your replies:

  1. I do not have a MINIFY addon installed (in fact, I cant even see that listed)
  2. I am using Excel to view the output CSV file
  3. It doesn't matter whether I request a Comma, Semicolon or Tab delimited file. Excel always sees the commas as a delimiter.
  4. I've tried exporting (Tab Delimited) only Product Code, Language and Description, and opened the CSV file with Word Pad - see:
    "Product code Language"
    "15-1634 ""en"""
    "15-1644 ""en"""
    "15-1654 ""en"""
    "15-1033 ""en"""
    "15-1043 ""en"""
    "15-1034 ""en"""
    "15-1044 ""en"""
    "15-1036 ""en"""
    "15-1046 ""en"""
    "15-1038 ""en"""

You can see that I'm missing a Column Title.

When opening the file in excel my column titles are delimited with a semicolon:

Product code;Language;Product id;Description

Which is fine, but the data is messed up.

Column 1: 15-1634;"en";"1";"

For use in studio

Column 2: home

Column 3: educational

Column 4: corporate and commercial environments

Column 5: where appearance is important

...and so on.

If I convert the text to columns, select "delimited", "Semicolon". I receive a warning "There's already text here. Do you want to replace it?" If I select "Yes", I loose all data from Column 2 onward.

Perhaps there's another technique for viewing the CSV file in excel?

Hi All,

I've tried experimenting with the description of a single product.

I removed the description from the item. Then, ran my text through Notepad (to strip any html coding etc), then imported the description via CSV file. The results were that I lost the space formatting on the published webpage.

I then exported the data again, to see if I'd removed any bugs. Sadly, I see the same problem reoccurring.

:confused:

post a sample few lines of your data, as csv Ill take a look

Suggest you select maybe 3 products to export, then post the *.csv file as *.txt here so we can look at the actual file, not what's being formatted here. Also, if you use 'code' tags, it would be a lot clearer.

You don't need to strip any html tags. Given the postings, I think you're over comlicating the issue and might be injecting the problems you are trying to solve.

Obviously others can export descriptioms just fine. So either you have a 3rd party addon that is interfering with the process or you're unintentionally modifying the data with the tools you are using to view it.

Hi All, I'm sorted - thanks for your help!

I exported the file as a comma delimited CSV, opened with Excel, and hey-presto it works just fine.

Thanks again for your tips and suggestions!