Preserving French accents when importing coverage via CSV
By default CSV files save in the “ANSI” encoding, and don't properly handle French Characters and other multi-language characters. To conserve your French accents follow the set of steps that best suits your environment from the options below.
Windows
You can use Notepad, which comes as a core application with Windows, to save the proper format.
- Open your CSV file with Notepad
- Choose File > Save As…
- Change the Encoding dropdown to “Unicode big endian”
You can now import the CSV file as needed. The French accents will be preserved.
Mac
Unfortunately, the built-in text editor with OSX does not make this adjustment properly. However, there is a free third party application called TextWrangler that does.
- Download and install TextWrangler if you don’t already have it
- Open your CSV file with TextWrangler
- Choose File > Save As…
- Change the Encoding dropdown to “Unicode (UTF-16 Little-Endian)”
You can now import the CSV file as needed. The French accents will be preserved.
Excel
** please note that that these steps may vary slightly depending on the version/edition of Excel.
- With Excel open, create a new workbook. Click File >> New… >> Blank Workbook (Ctrl+N / ⌘+N).
- Click “Data >> Get External Data >> From Text…”.
- In the “Select Data Source” window, find the desired CSV file, select it, and click “Import”.
- In the “Text Import Wizard – Step 1 of 3″ window, choose UTF-8 as the file origin, select “Delimited” and click “Next”.
- In the “Text Import Wizard – Step 2 of 3″ window, check the box next to “Comma” and click “Next”.
- In the “Text Import Wizard – Step 3 of 3″ window, select Finish.
You can now manipulate and/or import the CSV file as needed. The French accents will be preserved.