I have products where it is important to have symbols like ™ and ®, as these are necessary to be with product name. When I tried to import such products, it says "General system exception happened" on "Check Data".
After removing same symbols, file is being validated successfully.
I am using Magento 2.1.0.
Best Answer
Pretty sure it's caused by the fact that those characters are not supported when copied/pasted like this.
I reckon you should use their HTML equivalent instead:
™®The W3C provides a nice character entity reference if you need to find out more characters: https://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref