Why do some characters contained in an issue text field translate incorrectly when exported to a CSV

[Randy Erbacci]

Some of the characters that appear to export incorrectly are single-quotes, double-quotes, bullets ... This issue is seen in single-line text fields and multi-line text fields. This seems to be an itermittent problem as sometimes this happens and other times it does not.

[Andy Heinzer]

Are you using the native CSV export in JIRA 7.2 and higher?  Or are you using a 3rd party plugin in JIRA in order to export this information?

It sounds strange if you can only intermittenly repeat this with the same data being exported.   There is a known bug in JIRA's native CSV export method if the data being exported contains a comma in the text field:  https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-62517

That bug specifically has comments in regards to the use of quotes for these text values that then contain a comma, this comma is getting escaped.   Perhaps you're actually seeing this specific bug instead.

[Kristina Haggård]

Swedish characters (å, ä, ö) are coming out funny too when export to CSV is done, and now that the Excel export is gone missing, this is not a good thing at all. Things become unreadable. (We are using native CSV export.)

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi @Kristina Haggård

In my own instance I was able to export those characters correctly using the CSV export in Jira.   But I am interested to learn more about your specific problem here.

With the Jira application itself, we tend to recommend that users setup Jira to use UTF-8 encoding whenever possible.  So much so we created this KB: JIRA Application internationalisation and encoding troubleshooting.

If your Jira application is not using UTF-8 here, it might explain why the export is not rendering this character correctly. In my search I found each of those three characters on this list of UTF8 characters so they should be represented here when exported if your Jira instance is using UTF-8.

Try following that KB guide.  You will likely need to restart Jira to complete those steps.  Try that, and then see if your csv export shows these characters correctly then.

Andy

[Kristina Haggård]

Hi @Andy Heinzer, thank you for guide, hope this will do the trick! :-)

Regards

/Kristina