How to Retain Foreign Characters with .CSV Uploads for your Locations
How to prevent non-western and other foreign characters from becoming corrupted when you upload locations into your Bullseye account.
| Requirements: Applies to all account types. |
If you upload a .csv file file into Bullseye from outside of North America, you may get corrupted characters in your data. This may be displayed as question marks, instead of the actual characters. This often happens with files that contain Asian characters, or with data that has accent marks that are used outside of North America.
First, try simply saving the file as a CSV UTF-8 (unicode) file as in the screenshot below before uploading:
If you are in North America, and save the file as a regular csv file, this will save the file as an ASCII file, which does not support foreign characters.
The following instructions apply to situations where the file is being used outside of North America, on a Windows machine, and file will be opened by MS Excel.
1. Save the file as a Unicode Text file.
2. Open the file in an editor that supports Unicodes such as Note Pad ++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/ . (Note that, although regular notepad can save to Unicodes, it does not support all Unicode formats, and is likely to not convert all characters correctly). Between the header fields, there will be blank spaces (tabs). Select any tab between one of the header fields (it will light up).
3. Copy the tab, and use the find/replace option. In Notepad ++, there is a binocular icon you can click on.
4. After selecting the icon, you will see a Replace tab, select that tab. In the Find What field, paste the tab you copied. In the Replace With field, enter a comma (,). Select Replace All. This will replace the tabs with commas, which Bullseye requires in order to upload.
5. Save the file by going to File/Save.
6. Rename the file to have .csv as the extension without opening it. Simply replace the .txt file extension to .csv by right clicking on the file and renaming it. Make sure that your computer is configured to display the file extensions or you will not be able to change the extension.
7. Upload the file.