s2Member Pro - CSV Import / Export - German "Umlauts"

#1

Hi everyone!

As You may have heard, many European countries have special characters.- in this case it’s Germany.

We have some “Umlauts” ( “ä”, “ö”, “ü” ) and the “ß”.

I have to import a bigger list of users to a new website and tried this according to the docs ans hints.
Works fine so far but: all datafields containing Umlauts or “ß” stay empty.

The special Characters are used very often in geman langauge, so it would be very important, to get this to work.
Do You have any tips how I could configure s2Member to allow the Import of these characters?

Best regards and many thanks!

#2

I believe this is a WordPress issue and not s2Member. I did import nearly 17,000 records into WordPress using s2Member Pro and did not have any problem with diacritical marks. However, when editing where a user last name had a mark, it would not save and would showed an error. In my research, it is a WP issue. I’m pretty sure I used a test WP site without s2Member to verify that. I had to remove the apostrophes, mostly in my case. O’Brien became O Brien. I added a message on the form where people would be joining to skip the characters.

1 Like
#3

Thanks for sharing your experience and helping, Jim! :slight_smile:

Hallo Hans!

I see. Could you tell me what fields you were you trying to import with those characters? Were those in the username, or other fields? Usernames in WP are restrictive.

When you create the user from WP Admin > Users > Add New, can you enter those values without issue? Is the problem also there, or is it different than with the importer?

I look forward to your update. :slight_smile:

#4

Thanks and sorry for the delay, I had to struggle with severe problems in other projects.

Could you tell me what fields you were you trying to import with those characters? Were those in the username, or other fields?

Yes, I know and kept username and similar without special characters. These were all custom-fields.

When you create the user from WP Admin > Users > Add New , can you enter those values without issue?

Yes, they work fine.

In the meantime I came up with a detail that I might have overlooked myself.
German versions of MS Excel and Open Office Calc are usually set to “ISO 8859” by default, not to “UTF-8”, so I probably saved the data in this format.

Is it possible that the CSV import/export in s2Member only works properly with “UTF-8”?

@ Cristián: If the CSV import/export generally works with special characters I would test it again.
The reason why I ask is: I had to deal with wordpress-plugins that could not handle special characters correctly at all and that could not be solved (wasted a lot of time on this).
Nevertheless, I assume, that s2member is programmed more accurate overall. If you say it should work, I believe you.

Best regards and many thanks!

#5

A supplementary question:

Username without special characters is evident.

Can I use special characters for “First Name”, “Last Name” and “Display name”?

Thanks and best regards!

#6

Sorry to not reply earlier, but we were having issue with Last Name and First Name with apostrophes in names. I just checked and Nickname can have an apostrophe. I also misspoke when I included diacritical marks as you were using. Those seem to work on the few I tested in First & Last.

#7

Short Update for interested parties:

I tried to edit import/export/re-import files in Open Office Calc and paid attention to strictly use “UTF-8”.

Seems to work for european special characters like german “Umlauts” etc…

Give it a try!