[Farling]

Originally Posted by DickNervous

1. Many system names (and in several description fields) there is text with ' in them. This is usually in a system name such as "A'eouya", but is also in text such as "The captain's chair". After reading through this topic I tried to put double quotes around the system name, which allowed a small sample import to run, but the system name showed up in RW as "A’eouya​". It also put the "’" in any spot a single quote was in the text.

Is there a way to avoid getting the ’ characters and get the ' instead? And do I need to go put " around every system name that has an ' in it?

I think CSV file formats might allow single quote to be used as an alternative to double quotes to mark the boundaries of a single field.

I will have to look to see why the single quote character is being imported as three separate characters. It might be encoding problems.

Could you have a look at the CSV table which is displayed in the bottom half of the window to see if that table still shows the single quote or is showing those three characters? This will help me know if it is the CSV reader or the XML writer which is causing the issue.

Do single quotes appear fine in other parts of text?

Originally Posted by DickNervous

2. Many descriptions are multiple paragraphs with line feeds in them. This caused the import to get misaligned and put things in the wrong fields, resulting in it attempting to populate the public_name field with an entry that was a few paragraphs long. I have tried to fix this by editing the CSV file in Notepad++ and it seems to help, but then the text shows up in RW as one big block of text which can be difficult to read.

How can I keep the paragraphs for the import?

I think that multi-line fields can be defined in the CSV file by putting double quotes at the start and end of each field. At the moment, the CSV Import tool puts everything into a single paragraph. I suppose the tool could be updated so that a blank line in the middle of some text marks indicates where a paragraph break is required? Would this handle the text in your case?

Originally Posted by DickNervous

3. If I have a text string in the CSV that represents a URL, what type of snippet should I import it into so that it shows up as an active link in the topic view? I tried text, but it just shows up as plain text until I edit something in the topic and save it, at which point it is recognized as a URL.

The conversion from plain text to URL is usually a manual thing that the program does. I could add this into the CSV import tool, possibly as an option in case other users don't want URLs converted (although I guess RW will convert them as soon as the text is edited anyway).

Originally Posted by DickNervous

4. How can I import a simple picture from a URL? I know if I go in and select load from file and put a URL in, it will import the image. Can I do that with an import as well?

At the moment it isn't possible to import images easily. I don't think there is a way to encode them in CSV format. The RWEXPORT file format allows images to be defined, but the difficulty is creating a simple way for my CSV import tool to detect an image reference inside the CSV file.

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So, new feature requests appear to be:

1 - handle single quote properly

2 - detect paragraphs when importing large amounts of text.

3 - detect URLs when importing text.

4 - provide some mechanism to import images.