Importing French accents and hyperlinks encoding problems

Hi,

thanks for your post, and sorry for the trouble!

As it seems, you have tried a few things already. And it is great that you also provide example data! Thanks!

Now, unfortunately, import for formatted data (e.g. data with HTML, like in links) from Excel is very tricky ?? The HTML export is the only real choice that we have here, as the HTML is not preserved when exporting to CSV, unfortunately. And even worse, sometimes the HTML has a bad structure and can not be imported at all.
In your case, this doesn’t seem to be the problem though. Instead, the problem seems to be related to the character encoding, but more in the interal HTML import code in PHP.

With converting the file to UTF-8 in Textwrangler, you’ve done everything you can, in that regard. Additionally, TablePress tries that conversion itself, as well. Unfortunately, as seen in this case, the internal PHP functions that TablePress uses for the import (like simplexml_import_dom()) don’t seem to care about that ??

So, I’ll do a little bit more research on this, to maybe make this more robust, but right now I have no real idea of what to do here ??

Regards,
Tobias

Thanks so much for the response Tobias!

Too bad there is no obvious solution. Have you had better or worse luck in general exporting and importing between TablePress and Google Spreadsheets?

Thanks again,

Spencer

Hi Spencer,

thanks for your reply, and sorry that I couldn’t help so far.
This seems to be related to the internals of PHP indeed, but I haven’t found ways around that ??

About Google Spreadsheets: I don’t really have experience with that, unfortunately. I mostly use Excel. You could of course try to open the Excel file in Google Docs, and export from there to HTML or CSV, in the hope that the links are preserved.

Regards,
Tobias

Thanks again for a super prompt response!

I tried the google spreadsheet importing and exporting and the accents still don’t come through on TablePress.

This is a slightly different question, so let me know if I should start a new thread, but the non-profit organization that I’m working with might consider primarily basing all of this contact data on their site – in tablepress, IF there was a simple and clean way for visitors to the site to click on a link to download a PDF or excel version of the table. Do you have any recommendations for this?

Thanks again,

Spencer

Hi Spencer,

sorry to hear that the Google Docs attempt also did not work ??

About the question: No, we can keep that here, that’s fine.

For PDF and Excel export, please take a look at the DataTables TableTools Extension for TablePress: https://tablepress.org/extensions/datatables-tabletools/

Regards,
Tobias

Great, I think that solution may just work out as an alternative.

Thanks again!

I’ll mark this as resolved and will keep my eyes open for any future accent encoding solutions.

Spencer

Hi Spencer,

great to hear that this will help! ??

And yes, I hope that the encoding issue can be fixed in the future. I have it on my list!

Best wishes,
Tobias

Hi Spencer,

good news: I think I have found a solution.
It has to do with an XML declaration, and in a short test with your link to the test HTML table from above, it works on my server.

To verify, could you also try the possible solution? To do that, please download the current TablePress development version from https://tablepress.org/download/tablepress-dev.zip and replace your current TablePress version with that.
After that, the import of HTML files with accents should hopefully work ??

Regards,
Tobias

Hi,
Finally i switch to Tablepress ??
I have the same issue, i try to import html with some “extra caracteres” like ‘&’, resulting error.

I tried your dev version, seems not change anything ??
Which part/file/line manage this import to try to find a solution ??

Thanks

Radyium

Hi,

can you please post some more information, like what errors you get?
HTML import is unfortunately tricky, so it might be necessary to use CSV instead.

Regards,
Tobias

The imported file contains errors:

Error 68: htmlParseStartTag: invalid element name in line 966, column 14

Thanks to reply so quick ??

I’m trying with simplexml load string and/or CDATA

From wp reload i have some wrong caractere with export csv, only html seems export correctly that’s why i use html

Hi,

ok, thanks for that! This error is indeed unrelated to that of the original poster in this thread, so the development version does not help here (but you should continue using it).

With the exported CSV file: When do you see that there’s a wrong character? After importing it into TablePress?
Please try this: Before importing it, open the CSV file in a text editor and save it again with a character encoding of “UTF-8”. This usually fixed such problems.

If that does not help, you can check the HTML file for that error message, by checking line 966 in a text editor.

Oh, and if this is about switching from WP-Table Reloaded to TablePress, why don’t you use the internal migration function?

Regards,
Tobias

Hi,
I use in first the migration tools, but i will need also to import sometimes for x reason ?? ( i’m the dev of a client ?? )
I don’t have access to the live version, so i can’t test to convert the CSV, sorry ??

Actually seems work with load string and & instead of &, i’m still testing to fix that.

I will keep in touch if i find something.

Hi,

ah, ok. That makes sense then ??
Yes, encoding the & could help.

If you find something, please let me know!

Best wishes,
Tobias

At the end i will just for the moment convert every caracteres before import, i don’t find any “correct” way to do that after export ??
(or maybe encode html before export in wp reload in HTML mode)

Thanks anyway