Export data in CSV adds special characters?

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1

Hi,
When I export data, it is defaulted to CSV and I notice that it adds some special character
e.g. Bryan Raveen Nelson becomes Bryan Raveen Nelson

I tried unsuccessfully to overcome this by saving it as excel file.

Is there any option to

  1. export without these added special characters?

TQ.

2

If you manually retype the spaces, does it make a difference when you export?

3

yes, it is removed when you export …

practically how can I do this as to re-type thousands of spaces is too much time.

TQ

4

I wonder if it’s a side effect of the copy/paste bug that was happening for a few months, but was recently fixed a few weeks ago. That bug was noticable when copying and pasting data as it would replace the space character with a different character that happened to look like a space. People were running into issues with relations that did not work as expected.

Let me ask this first. How was the data populated in the table?

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5

it was imported from excel file. TQ

6

Ok. I was curious because I don’t recall any similar issues with importing data.

So here is my thought. Not great, but it should work, and if you do this strictly from the builder you shouldn’t incur any updates. It’s a quick and dirty way to get all of the data corrected.

  • Find a record with a space character that you have not corrected yet, and copy that “space” character to your clipboard.
  • Create a template column in your table that takes the name column as input. For the replacements, paste the invalid “space” character from the clipboard into the left field and type a real space character into the right field. The goal is to end up with a template column value that looks identical to the name column value, but replaces all of the invalid characters with valid ones.
  • Create a separate tab in your app that is only visible to you.
  • In that tab, add a collection for your table.
  • Set the filter on the collection to only show rows where the name column includes that invalid “space” character that you hopefully still have in your clipboard.
  • Change the on click action for the collection to a Set Column action and set it up to overwrite the name column with the value in the template column.

Once that is set up, hopefully you should be able to rapid click on the collection items and it should correct the name while filtering out the corrected rows. Once the collection is empty, then everything should be fixed.

That’s the quick and dirty way to do it.

7

thanks Jeff for the “dirty” solution … I can try this but that is only one column … I have many other columns such as address and publications … basically the whole table is “infected” … if this is a bug, isn’t Glide looking into this?

is there a direct link to raise support as it is a major issue.

best regards,
Vuthy

8

The bug was fixed a few weeks ago to stop the bleeding, but I don’t think Glide was about to stick their hands in everyones data. That could make a bigger mess than you think.

If you want to raise a ticket with Glide, here are the instructions.

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9

I am trying to get a support ticket but this is what I get. Is there another way? TQ

a3p

10

Support is available for teams with Pro plans and above. Which plan are you on?

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11

Just an update on this topic …

When I create a button using Integrations / generate CSV file, the exported file does not contain any special characters. It does not answer my question but it is a solution in case someone runs into the same issue.

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