Remove special characters & linebreaks in text entry data (Response Export Automation export issue) | XM Community
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Remove special characters & linebreaks in text entry data (Response Export Automation export issue)

  • 20 October 2020
  • 3 replies
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I am having an issue with Response Export Automation - Daily export as CSV file. There is an open-ended/text entry question in the survey and people have commas and insert line breaks in their text entry responses. When the file exports and then is loaded into our database, it creates additional separate rows/records. I really only need completion date and externaldatareference fields - but because I can't specify which fields to export in Automation Export, trying to figure out work-arounds... are there custom rules or coding i can add to survey to remove characters from data? Should I be using a different export format?

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Best answer by Radam 20 October 2020, 21:50

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Userlevel 5
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TSV (Tab separated) will solve your comma problem
JSON is probably the best because it really doesn't care what the data is or isn't.

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I'm starting wonder if the line breaks that are causing the issue, because there's plenty of commas in other participants' comments but not sure why some people's write-in data breaks off into new rows (not into new columns). could it potentially be issue with file processing settings on my team's side?

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I've also ran into issues with various different encoding formats with CSV, might be worth looking into that too.

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