Problem with the export messages in CSV format (french languages messages)

Hello,
I am having trouble with the csv export message functions. When importing in Excel, the ''Commentaires" field content is displayed on several different lines, even with some line spaces in between.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3dpbivswao9e79b/gform-gravity-export-problem.png

I tried to change the separator via the functions.php but then I get a fatal error which makes my website unaccessible.
The messages are in French.

Thanks a lot for your help.
Best regards
Damdo

Thanks for the quick solution but that does not help.
I did import with UTF-8 selected but still same issue.

Hi Alsc,
here is the link to my exported file
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3dpbivswao9e79b/gform-gravity-export-problem.png

thanks for your help.
Damdo74

Hi,

I'm having a similar issue with textarea contents.

I'm also working with french messages, but I dont think encoding is the only problem (I think damdo74 mainly has troubles with Excel for Mac... which is not really friendly with any encoded CSV files when importing, unfortunately)

The other issue is that exported messages (with forms containing Textarea data) are broken if the user used line-breaks or so in its message...

Even if no special caracters seems to be in the CSV file itself, the import (both on Excel for Windows or Mac) breaks the data formats & columns when the CSV is imported...

I tried to check the export.php file, but I could'nt really find out what to do... Is there any way to clear those line-breaks especially for messages exports ?

Thank you very much for your help, and have a good day !

Hello Chris,

Thank you for your quick reply, and the precious infos you gave concerning CSV files !

I created a pastebin to show you how the CSV file looks like (I had to change some infos concerning the clients, but no modifications concerning the data "format").
http://pastebin.com/L5uyBm56

As you will see, the problem is with the line-breaks that excel interprets as a new row (even if the data seems correctly delimited with double quotes)
How can I deal with that since the CSV format works that way (1 row for 1 "info", right ?)

When exporting messages, is it possible that Gravity Forms could "clean" those line-breaks trough a function or filter ?

Thank you very much ! GF Rocks ;)

Best regards,

For the moment, i still couldn't find a good way to solve this...

Hello
Same problem here.

My form has a textarea field.
Each line break in this textarea makes a new row when I import the CSV in Microsoft Office 2007.

I double click on the CSV file, select the first column (A). Then choose Data > Text to Columns > Delimited > Delimiter : Comma > Text delimiter : Double-quote.

This same file opens in LibreOffice without any column problem. But since Microsoft Office is the most common software, I would expect exports to work well with it.

I can send you the CSV file, so you can test it and find a solution please. The data is private, how can I do that?

Well, I am disappointed.
GravityForms should handle compatibilty itself.
Microsoft Office is the leader, and I don't think my client will be pleased when I will tell him to install another program. They have their own macros/ apps running with Office. Using another program is a big let down.
I will see if I can make it work, since I can't let my client with the broken exports.

Hello,
still no solution regarding this .csv import issue ?
Please help

We got this problem each time we make a Gravity form and the costumer need the data.
Replicating the problem is easy:

1. Just make a form that has various fields including one or more text fields.
2. Make the form 'live' on a webpage.
3. Now enter some data into the form from a few 'users'.
4. In the text input fields try to enter some multi line text with line breaks -as users often do.
5. Export the form data to a .csv file.

If you then try to import the data into an Excel then the user data without linebreaks will import ok into each column and create a new line for each user.

However whenever a text field got a linebreak within the "" then excel will start a new line and the data for that user gets split over one or more lines and put into the wrong columns.

There are no simple solution to fix this in Excel so the data remains completely useless for the costumer. You can try to fix it manually but this is very hard when the form got data from thousands of users.

One of our developers has made a routine to fix the .csv files.
But Gravity Forms need a build in solution if we should continue to use it - as costumers must be able to export and import into Excel them self.

A simple solution would be an option to export form data with linebreaks within "" converted into something like "</br>" or "*LB*" or "|" (maybe user specified) when exported. Then it can be imported into Excel correctly and you can then replace the code in Excel with something else.