[SalesForce] Unable to use dataloader to load file with Asian characters

Last year, I used dataloader to upload new leads with Asian characters by following this process:
1) In Excel, save file as unicode text
2) Open file in notepad, set Save As to UTF-8, select All Files type, and type in a .csv extension
3) Open dataloader and go…

I just tried with dataloader and am receiving an error message that says: CSV Error: Invalid CSV file format. Please select a different file. com.sforce.async.CSVReader$CSVParseException: Found unescaped quote. A value with quote should be within a quote.

Thing is, I tried with a file that I successfully uploaded in December. What has changed? Thanks for any feedback.

Best Answer

You're doing several file manipulations with various utilities and while it seems like that should work to convert an excel spreadsheet to CSV there are probably a lot of pitfalls to avoid.

You might check out this question on Stackoverflow about exporting Excel spreadsheets as unicode csv files.

Personally I think this answer has the best approach (but there are several options):

  1. Save as a CSV from excel
  2. Run CSV unicode converter

You can use iconv command under Unix (also available on Windows as libiconv).

After saving as CSV under Excel in the command line put:

iconv -f cp1250 -t utf-8 file-encoded-cp1250.csv > file-encoded-utf8.csv

(remember to replace cp1250 with your encoding).

Works fast and great for big files like post codes database, which cannot be imported to GoogleDocs (400.000 cells limit).

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