A few notes converning CSV files:

A number of people are having issues with CSV files (phazie's version, and the latter hacks to it) so I just wanted to relay a few notes from what I've noticed in my own work.

Working with CSV files is convenient ... you download your CSV file, and double-click it to edit ... then click "save" and upload... WRONG!!

You cannot just click "save". You must use "save as" and from the drop down box and select "CSV Windows". Just clicking "save" will put the file in microsoft's version of a CSV file, and this will not import correctly into EP!

Now, lets say you use OpenOffice to edit the CSV... look at the import window on open. Most people just click through and are fine. HOWEVER, if you have any special characters like (R) (C) tm the degree symbol, you must make sure your character set matches your data. OO will default to UTF-8 ... but most websites (in the US) will be Western ISO-8859-1. If you try to upload UTF-8 data to an western iso-8859-1 website, you will get "funky characters". This has to do with your databases and what collation they are in.

You can check your database collation by going into your phpMyAdmin and picking the products database, then "structure". You will see a "Collation" column. This in most cases will be latin1_swedish_ci which is compatible with iso-8859-1.

This perhaps sounds complicated, but it really isn't ... it's just a matter of knowing what your databases is going to export (say you typed descriptions in the zencart admin) or what type of data your vendor supplier is giving you.

HTML also has special characters that you can use in place of the extended characters. So, for the (R) registered symbol, you can use the HTML equivalent ® There are HTML equivalents for (R) (C) tm the degree symbol and more. Just google it.

Also. There is a big difference between normal single and double quotes and SMART QUOTES. Be sure you use the standard " and not the smart quote equivalent for your delimiter!

If you want to use a lot of special symbols and smart quotes, I recommend using OpenOffice.

Exporting CSV data from OO:
Once your data is ready, you select "save as" from the main menu, "Text CSV (.csv)" from the File type drop menu AND check "edit filter settings". You need to make sure you have the proper Character set selected!!! For CSV file, you would use the comma for your Field Delimiter and for TAB delimited files (aka .txt files for 1.2.5.4) select {TAB}.

The nice thing about OO is it will properly delimit every field with " (or what ever you choose). Excel will NOT do this!!!! It tries to be smart and in the end often causes problems.

Now the clincher. These notes are very pertinent if you are using a MAC. I have not verified on the PC yet, but I imagine everything would still apply. I think the CSV files on Windows normally export as "CSV Windows" but have not had a chance to check this. Windows users have it a bit better because they don't have the Mac end-of-line recognition problem that some mac users have encountered.

Hope this info helps!

Oh. Just remembered. If you look at your text data and see a lot of funky characters, try changing your font to Lucidia Sans Unicode. This is a good way to see if your data is in UTF-8.