Description Field Cut Off on Export

Question

I have a saved search filter that I export to CSV daily but in some rows the Description fields gets truncated. It happens only for tickets from a specific, single creator and doesn't seem to be related to its length or inclusion of line breaks as I have many other tickets that are longer and include more line breaks that do not experience that issue.

Adam Harcovitz · Answer

Now that I've started thinking about character counts I did some more digging. So our backup appliance sends an alert email to our helpdesk email account. Occasionally that email has a particularly high character count (between 34000 and 52000). Those high-character-count emails then become a JIRA ticket with a character count consistently between 32000 and 32100. If any of those tickets are exported to CSV, those are the ones that are consistently truncated to 255 characters.

What is most interesting is that if I export a history of these emails, JIRA has no trouble exporting Description fields between 255 and 32100 characters up until 29-MAY, after which all of these are truncated to 255 characters. I did a comparison of the Descriptions from a ticket that gets truncated on export and one that doesn't and couldn't see a difference. I also went through and changed the dates on the two so that they match and did a string comparison in Excel and they returned as identical so there's definitely no change in the template our server uses to send the alert.

There is no valuable information after 32100 characters so I don't care if it gets truncated there, but the first 255 characters are of no use to me either. If I can get JIRA's export behavior back to what it was before 29-MAY I'll be a happy camper.

Adam Harcovitz · Answer

These tickets aren't generated by the users, they're generated by one of our backup appliances. In examining the tickets that export truncated descriptions I'm seeing two different messages that have the issue. Both of them truncate mid-word, one type truncates 255 characters (suggesting a limit of 8 bits) and the other at 248 characters. But I have plenty of tickets who's descriptions far exceed 255 characters and those fields export to CSV without issue.

David Skreiner2 · Answer

Could it be a special character that your user has pasted over from Word? Like, if the Description is always truncated at the end of the same word, take a close look at the space behind it.

(Just a vague guess. I tested exporting issues where the description includes a non breaking space (the NBS has given me headaches countless times before), but that worked fine.)