Hey David,
I have quite a few CSV data files. In the descriptions there are many apostrophe's and commas. The commas cause problems breaking up the feeds and placing the wrong value in the wrong fields. I have removed commas for now and rewrote the descriptions but now I have found an apostrophe appears as a square. Can any of these problems be solved? Thanks, Steven.
Hi Steve,
As this is bad formatting (you often come across commas in a CSV file) the only thing you would be able to do would be if you have any control over the feeds and were able to suggest a much better format - for example PIPE or TAB separated values. Either way; the person generating the feed must always make sure that the delimiter character does not appear in the fields without the field being in QUOTES (and then, quotes themselves must not appear!)...
Regarding the apostrophe appearing a square; this indicates a character encoding issue; in other words the feed is in a different character set to your site. Assuming that you site is configured to use UTF-8 (I make this the default as it is by far the most common); then it is most likely that this feed is in ISO-8859-1 (the next most common). If you have other feeds the necessitate UTF-8; then you can use the "UTF8-Encode" filter on the product name / description field of this feed to convert them into UTF-8. Alternatively, you can just configure your site to use ISO-8859-1 by changing $config_charset in config.php.
Cheers,
David.