importToList: quoting commas

[Anonymous]

The importToList (SOAP API) documentation says and shows an example indicating that the lead data to be imported is in the form of comma-separated fields, like this:

<stringItem>Awesomesauce,Developer,Code Slinger,Marketo,dawesomesauce@marketo.com</stringItem>

I assume there must be some quoting convention in effect (to handle a field whose data itself contains a comma), but I didn't have any luck uncovering that convention. How do we ensure that a stray comma in a data field is accurately handled as field content rather than as a field separator?

[Anonymous]

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think we follow the standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values) so if you put quotes on that field, we'll handle the comment fine.

If you tried to create that file in something like an Excel spreadsheet with commas and save it as a CSV, you can see how they do it (and I'm pretty sure we accept it from Excel's CSVs)

[Anonymous]

That's a good question. Would it be possible to do validation on your end to check for this case before passing in data to the API? 

[Anonymous]

Also, are you wrapping string item in quotes? Let me know if that doesn't handle this case?

[Anonymous]

Erik and Murtza: thank you for your answers. Wrapping problematic fields in quotes per that Wikipedia page works perfectly.