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Issues with strange character where user used a carriage return

Gravity Support Forums » Plugin Support » Gravity Forms

  1. RealDesign
    Member

    I have a form at : http://basketfullofrecipes.com/
    Where the user is submitting recipes. We have some users who are using the "return" key inside the longer text boxes. When you export the csv file and then import it into excel, we find a "junk" character has been put where the carriage return is.

    I personally am not able to replicate this, it is my end user that is having the issue. They are using windows and a variety of excel versions including at least 2010 and 2003. However she has sent me a screen shot and I have seen the issue. When you look at the spreadsheet every thing looks fine until you highlight a cell with a carriage return in it and look in the formula bar ... then you see the funny character (it looks like a ? in a black diamond)

    Any ideas on how to eliminate this problem?

    Installation Status

    PHP Version 5.2.17
    MySQL Version 5.1.63
    WordPress Version 3.3.1
    Gravity Forms Version 1.6.5.1

    Posted 12 years ago on Wednesday August 22, 2012 | Permalink

  2. Chris Hajer
    Key Master

    Normally, this is due to the encoding being used when the CSV is imported into Excel. I find that setting the character set to Unicode UTF-8 takes care of the strange characters in the CSV. I don't have a current version of Excel here to capture the dialog, but this is what it looks like in OpenOffice.org when importing a CSV.

    http://minus.com/l2pmXVR2xqPcN

    Note the first drop down, the Character Set. By default, that was Western Europe (ISO 8859-1) when I first ran the program. I think changing that will probably work for this problem.

    Posted 12 years ago on Sunday August 26, 2012 | Permalink

  3. RealDesign
    Member

    Thank-you ... I will see if I can get the customer to get it to work!

    Much appreciated

    Posted 12 years ago on Sunday August 26, 2012 | Permalink