Importing CSV with special character enclosing fields

Cesar Covarrubias September 12, 2012

I have been tasked with migrating some projects from Mantis to JIRA, but with some restrictions:

  1. None of the custom fields in Mantis should be brought over (we are trying to clean up our bug tracking instances)
  2. Only public comments should be brought over

Given these 2 requirements, I have been forced to use a CSV import. The issue I am having is importing the comments in. Our comments have special characters in it, including apostrophes, quotes, parens, greater/less than, etc. The only character the comments don't have is the backtick (`). When I do my export from MySQL i am using this backtick to enclose each field, separating them with commas.

Is it possible to specify to the JIRA CSV importer which character is enclosing the comments?

1 answer

1 accepted

1 vote
Answer accepted
Pawel Niewiadomski
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
September 13, 2012

No, it's not possible. You always use " to surround the text and then you can put anything inside.

Check the documentation for details https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Importing+Data+from+CSV#ImportingDatafromCSV-Treatingspecialcharactersliterally

But I wonder why did you decide to go with CSV.

I think the easiest option in your case would be to copy Mantis database, then delete all the stuff you don't want and import it from there.

Have you tried this approach?

Cesar Covarrubias September 13, 2012

The Mantis database is huge and we are doing this on a project by project basis, so it would be a long arduous practice to have to delete everything from the db every project. I will check the documentation again to see if there is an easier way of handling my data. Thanks Pawel!

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer