Data Merge breaking some special characters

Jesse Reko

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    • February 5, 2018 at 4:36 pm #101438
      Jesse Reko
      Member

      Hi all, I am having an issue with data merge where I need to import an item titled:

      “U” Type Nut • Zinc
      but when i import a csv using data merge the text comes out
      “U” Type Nut • Zinc.

      straight up and down quotes don’t even show up.
      is there a way to solve this, or am i just going to have to run a find change for special characters after I create the merged document?

    • February 5, 2018 at 4:57 pm #101439
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      Sounds like an encoding problem. See if you can encode it differently when you do the save as from the spreadsheet app. Can you use UTF-8?

      (My guess is that those are curly quotes in the spreadsheet and may need to be converted to straight quotes first?)

      • February 5, 2018 at 5:58 pm #101442
        Jesse Reko
        Member

        That was exactly it David, except the .csv file was using UTF-8, so I set it to UTF-16 and it came through with no problems. Thanks for your help!

    • September 19, 2018 at 7:56 am #110443
      Willy Croezen
      Member

      I am having a similar isssue, the valu in my .csv file is this: Ra?80 if I perform datamerge, it comes out like this: Ra≥80
      i only have a windows machine at my disposal.
      i created my .csv in Open office calc. i have excel also, so solutions with either are fine…
      please help… it has me dumbfounded.

    • November 7, 2019 at 9:29 am #14323793
      Willy Croezen
      Member

      hi, David,

      fotr a while it was solved and i could use my special characters without problems in Indesign, and tehen my chinese colleague did something to the datafile, rendering it useless.
      have been trying teh last 4 hours to solve the issue, as I have a deadline, but without much luck, i tried everything, from saving from open office to saving the datafile from Excel and even notepad, but eitehr the file won’t open at all in Indesign, or I don’t get the special characters (larger than or equal and lesser than or equal) produced during the mail merge.
      in open office for windows, i can chose unicode, unicode UTF-7 and unicode UTF-8 i’m at a loss.

    • November 7, 2019 at 9:47 am #14323791
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      Hard to know, but sometimes weird stuff creeps in. Here are some articles that might help:

      Zap Gremlins in Problem Data Merge Files


      and

      Troubleshooting Data Merge Errors

    • November 21, 2019 at 3:07 am #14323560
      Christophe Huget
      Member

      I resolved my issue by opening the csv file with a text editor (in my case Textmate). By the command “Save as…”, I had the choice to encode it in UTF16BE or UTF16LE (CR, CRLF or even LF) = 6 possibilities. I don’t really know what are each of them, I saved the csv in each possibility, the UTF16BE-CR did the job, didn’t tried all of them.

    • January 13, 2021 at 7:32 pm #14334749
      Gergely Pataki
      Participant

      For windows users:

      I has the same issue, But after opening the *.csv file in text editor (notepad) and at save as options in the smaller save window I changed the unicode to ansi and it fixed the problem. there is a dropdown menu in the left side to save button, give it a try.

      Hope it will help.

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