CatalogHop

Accents and special characters garbled after a WooCommerce CSV import

What it means: WooCommerce reads CSV files as UTF-8 unless told otherwise. A file saved in another encoding, often by Excel on Windows, turns letters such as é into symbols like é or a question mark in a box. The text is imported exactly as it was read, so the damage shows in your store.

Find the rows in your file

WooCommerce product import

The product CSV you are about to import into WooCommerce (Products, Import), or the one that just failed.

Your file stays on this device

It is read and converted by this page, inside your browser. Nothing from the file is uploaded, and the tool keeps working offline once the page has loaded.

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How to fix it

  1. Open the original export and save it as "CSV UTF-8" (in Excel: File, Save As, CSV UTF-8).
  2. Or pick the file's real encoding under "Show advanced options", then "Character encoding of the file", on the import screen.
  3. Avoid opening and re-saving the file in Excel between export and import.

Example

A file with this problem

Type,SKU,Name,Published,Visibility in catalog,Tax status,In stock?,Stock,Regular price,Images,Parent,Attribute 1 name,Attribute 1 value(s...
simple,CAFE-1,Café mug,1,visible,taxable,1,5,12.00,,,,,

What the checker says about it

  • Some text looks garbled (for example "é" instead of "é"). The file was probably opened and saved in the wrong encoding by a spreadsheet program. WooCommerce will import the garbled text as it is, so fix it before importing.

Once the listed rows are fixed, check the file again; the checker also looks for the other problems in WooCommerce's import code, so you do not trade one error for the next.

Other WooCommerce import errors

Sources

Based on WooCommerce 11.2.2's import code and documentation. Not tested on a live store.