Illegal Characters during Import

Ben_Holt

We've noticed that apostrophes from the primary user field have caused problems when trying to update a Hardware Asset. To clarify we performed a search for assets, made a change to a couple of the fields, and then tried to reimport those assets. The import gets so far through before hitting an apostrophe and throwing an error. Would it be possible to get a list of illegal characters? Any good advice to get around this problem?

merlenette_jones

Ben_Holt said:

We've noticed that apostrophes from the primary user field have caused problems when trying to update a Hardware Asset. To clarify we performed a search for assets, made a change to a couple of the fields, and then tried to reimport those assets. The import gets so far through before hitting an apostrophe and throwing an error. Would it be possible to get a list of illegal characters? Any good advice to get around this problem?

Hello @Ben_Holt

This is a limitation of the system that you will have to work with and if not careful can cause hang ups in your workflow. Any type of special character is prohibited. I would ensure that all characters are alphanumeric. You will also want to ensure that there are you no spaces or carriage returns in your CSV file. Here is a link to help you scrub through your csv file to ensure its clean before importing - https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/2013/12/03/remove-carriage-returns-excel/

Hope that helps,

Merle

Peter_Settle

Are you importing from a csv file, as this should strip away the apostrophe along as the fields are defined correctly and not as text fields, I do know you can not use a $ in the fields that contain amounts.

damon_mulligan

@Ben_Holt
Are you having any other issues importing? The easiest way to get rid of character return is just search for "Ctrl-J" and either replace with a space or \n to add the characters for asset import to add a character return during import.