Automatically trim any trailing spaces after an email address during list import

[Dan_Stevens_]

When importing lists, if an email address contains spaces after the address, it will be included in the import, causing the email to be invalid.  Would like to see Marketo automatically remove these spaces during the list import.  I realize there are ways to manually do this but this would just make it so much easier and lessen the risk for invalid email addresses. 

When I used to develop web applications in my prior career, there was a very useful function that we used when importing contact information (including form submits) into SQL Server.  We simply applied a TRIM function to the email address that striped out any spaces before or after the address.  For example "TRIM(email address)".  I'm sure every application platform has this feature (ASP, PHP, etc.).

[Anonymous]

This would be fantastic to have!... Great idea.

[Anonymous]

Hi Dan and Karen,

We're having trouble reproducing this. Is there a specific case you run into often you can share? If you have an example file you can send it to me at erik@marketo.com.

 

[Dan_Stevens_]

Eric - import a a CSV file where there are email addresses that contain a space after the address. Marketo imports it as-is without removing the space. This can be easily fixed by applying a TRIM function to the email address.

[Anonymous]

It seems to be more nuanced than that, as my QA team can't reproduce it. Anyway, if you don't have more details we'll figure it out.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Maybe it's when we save an excel file to a Unicode Text file (tab-delimited). I'll confirm this when I'm back at my computer.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Erik - I just ran two tests on my end: uploaded a list as a .csv file and a unicode .txt file - both having a trailing space after the email address.  In both instances, they were imported successfully into Marketo without the trailing space.  But I know for a fact that when we've received lists from the field, there have been many occassions when an email address contained a trailing space and an invalid character was included as part of the lead's email address.  Here's an example of one:

[Anonymous]

Could be an old lead, since before we did this, or something specific to the encoding. If you get a reproducable case can you let me know? Otherwise, the basic version of this we have and have had for a while.

[Dan_Stevens_]

The last lead that has the trailing space included was entered back in September 2014.  When did Marketo enhance this functionality to strip trailing spaces?

[Anonymous]

Hi I have run into this issue today with extra space infront of email address in some cases as well as extra space trailing after email address when I imported a CSV (comma delimited) file into campaign.

Here is what I saw with <<diamond ?>> in front of affected leads.I had to manually remove space from each lead. I did not get an error message on upload and it was only that I was watching to see them sync to SFDC campaign and when they did not come over then I looked in Marketo to find out why and saw it had failed due to email address.

Is this functionality to strip spaces working? I assume it is meant to work without any settings having to be turned on - please confirm.

Also does it work on spaces that are infront of email address?  

Thanks in advance.