Magento – Can’t import product names/descriptions with special characters

character encodingimportexportmagento-1.9

I'm trying to import a product CSV which has Bulgarian product names/descriptions (using the standard import under import/export->import)

The only way I've been able to import any so far is by wrapping them in quotes or by putting roman characters in front of the Bulgarian.

e.g. 'Ламинирани ПДЧ' or xxx Ламинирани ПДЧ

without adding these characters it outputs the error: Required attribute 'name' has an empty value in rows: 1

It seems like the Bulgarian is being stripped out completely? My file is encoded as UTF-8 and I've also set the default charset as UTF-8 in the htaccess file.

Is it possible to import the Bulgarian without quotes/roman characters? Im hoping it works out of the box but if there's a programmatic solution to it then that's fine too.

Best Answer

Importing should not be a problem as long as all characters are in UTF-8 and the enclosing characters are present. I assume that you have an error in your input file, e.g. invalid escaping. So please double check your input file. I find it best to use LibreOffice for handling data import files as it a) handles UTF-8 correctly (unlike MS Excel) and you can easily specify delimiters and quotes.

Also check for non-printable characters that might conflict with the import.