How I solved my problem importing sentences in CSV format

Clozemaster
#1

Hey,
I just thought I’d post this here in case anybody had the same problem that I did.
I had a list of German sentences with translations that I wanted to upload but got an error message that didn’t explain what was wrong. Here’s what I did:

My CSV file had two columns (sentence and then translation). I made sure that the all of the entries had a translation in second column.

Then I think the problem was that the csv file was encoded in a format that Clozemaster didn’t like. So I saved the file (from Excel) as a UTF-8 CSV rather than just a regular CSV.

Then there was a problem of the sentences having commas. So I used =""""& A1 &"""” in Google sheets to add "s around all the sentences.

Then there was the problem that the file was saving with a break-line at the end, which Clozemaster didn’t like. So I opened the csv in notepad++ which showed the extra row and let me delete it. Also at some point in all this when I saved as a csv it included a whole bunch of extra blank rows, which I could see in notepad++ as many rows of just commas. So I deleted these and saved.

After this everything worked great.
Hope that this helps somebody :grinning:

7 Likes
#2

You can always use a TSV instead. :smile:

3 Likes
#3

You know, I’d never even heard about them before :joy:
But that does sound like the easier way round

3 Likes
#4

Thought I’d post this also in case it is helpful to someone.
Okay so this time I uploaded using a .tsv file
But I kept getting an error, but the error said nothing about what the problem was.

“Oh no! There was an error processing the text - sorry about that. Please try again and let us know if you see this message again.”

I eventually worked out that it was a handful of special characters that was causing the problem. Specifically these „“ and €

Considering that I was uploading 167 sentences, I think it would have been very helpful if a reason for the error had been given in the error message.

3 Likes
#5

The problem doesn’t really have anything to do with the character separator; it’s about the encoding. As I discussed a couple of years ago and as you found for yourself earier in this thread, the issue is that you need UTF8 to represent extended and foreign characters correctly.

4 Likes
#6

Okay thanks Lucius, that’s very helpful.
I don’t really know anything about using these encodings, but I’ll keep that in mind when I next upload sentences.

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