Issues with Unicode uploads

[Gary_Verster2]

This is crazy. Any word from marketo on the Support Case?

[Dan_Stevens_]

Not from what I already shared. I encourage anyone else that's experiencing this issue to also open up a support case to show them that this isn't an isolated occurrence.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Latest response from Support:

I'm working with our Product Management department to get confirmation if we are still supporting the import of Unicode Text files with binary encoding. Once they confirm if we are supporting this or not, I'll be able to confirm if I'll be sending this up as a regression from the Winter release or if this is the currently expected behavior.

If they don't, I sure hope they have an alternative.

[Anonymous]

I'm in the same boat as you, Dan. I've found a few articles here in the community that offer different approaches (.csv/.txt/etc.) that use UTF-8 and I still get wonky characters upon upload.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Mike - unless this issue has resurfaced, Marketo deployed a patch on 3/27/17 which resolved this for us.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Update from Marketo Support:

We have found that the problem is related to changes between php 5.3 and 5.6 (which was upgraded around the same time as release). It is not able to process a special character present in an existing file.  We are currently working on building a patch for this. I will continue to update you on that as progress is made.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Could be awhile to test that patch, so my workaround should stay handy. Note they probably need to use the PHP iconv extension (see above, iconv is the open-source standard on clients and servers).

[Anonymous]

I tried this solution below and it works for me:

Special Characters when downloading data from Marketo or Uploading into Marketo

[Gary_Verster2]

Hi Said,

Yeah, the comma-separated UTF-8 upload is always a fallback, but this could introduce extra columns into the data (which is why there is the 'Open in Wordpad/Notepad' step in the solution). The chances of getting a comma in an address field is not exactly low, so what should be a relatively clean, quick and painless upload of a tab-delimited file could easily become a much longer, painful one. And I fear for what would happen to those people who are less adept with data cleaning...

Needs to be fixed... that's all there is to it.

G.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Totally agree.  Using the Unicode approach is the simplest and least error-prone way to get these lists into Marketo. Why they would remove this functionality is beyond me and alienates Marketo's international customers.