How to make Tablepress support Chinese character when importing a CSV file

  • Resolved Brandon Zhang

    (@bradonzhang)


    3 years, 3 months ago

    Hi,

    Greetings from China.

    I had a tricky issue that I don’t know how to solve. My client wants to create new tables by uploading CSV file which contains Chinese character and Russian character, but after upload into Tablepress, Chinese character and Russian character got converted to strange characters “é￠??????????”.

    Wondering what do I need to do to make it support characters of these two language?

    The link I provided is working fine, the Chinese character in the table header was added directly in the dashboard, but now customer wants to export the CSV file, modify the data and re-upload, hence the problem with Chinese character.

    The site is using the latest WordPress version and Tablepress version.

    Thank you so much in advance.
    Brandon

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Author TobiasBg

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    thanks for your post, and sorry for the trouble.

    Normally, this should not be a problem, as by default, the database, WordPress, and TablePress use the UTF-8 character enoding, which can handle these characters without problems.

    In most cases, the problem actually is that the CSV file is either not in UTF-8 encoding or does not contain the characters correctly. I have seen this in the past e.g. when the CSV file is coming from Excel. Can you therefore please check the CSV file in a normal text editor (even Notepad on Windows is fine), to see if the characters show up there?

    Regards,
    Tobias

    Thread Starter Brandon Zhang

    (@bradonzhang)

    Hi Tobias,

    Thank you for your feedbacks.
    No need to be sorry. You’re providing free plugins for us to use. I should be thanking you.

    Just export another data table as CSV format, and I can see the Chinese character is there when I open it with Notepad, but doesn’t work if it’s opened in Excel. But customer needs to open the CSV in Excel, so they can copy, modify and paste new datas — lots of data, sadly ?? — and then reupload the CSV to the backend and replace the original data table.

    I tried to use a different CSV viewer to open the CSV file, it didn’t work as well.

    If there are no solutions, then I’ll have to keep the table header (where Chinese characters are at), delete the datas, and then append the newly modified data tables to it without Chinese character. It’s confusing to me just typing it here, haha.

    You’re knowledagable, maybe you have some new ideas as to how to tackle this?

    If not, I totally understand that.

    Many thanks,
    Brandon

    Plugin Author TobiasBg

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi Brandon,

    thanks for checking this! Yes, Excel’s handling of UTF-8 data is terrible sometimes ?? It can differ even between different versions, and I have even see it differ depending on how the CSV file is opened in Excel: By double-clicking on it, or by opening it from within Excel.
    Maybe you can try LibreOffice’s Calc as well? I have heard about good results with that in the past.

    If that also does not help, your approach probably is the best workaround here.

    Regards,
    Tobias

    Thread Starter Brandon Zhang

    (@bradonzhang)

    Hi Tobias,

    Just tried it real quick, LibreOffice works like a charm.

    Thank you so much!!!

    Brandon

    Plugin Author TobiasBg

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    no problem, you are very welcome! ?? Good to hear that this helped!

    Best wishes,
    Tobias
    ?
    P.S.: In case you haven’t, please rate TablePress here in the plugin directory. Thanks!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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