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1 BEST ANSWER
Accepted Solutions
Your observations are correct.
The documentation is incorrect.
The last time I tested, two years ago, the US, CA, AU, UK, DE File Exchange sites allowed limited characters based on ISO-8859-1 language limitations and that is the default format if no CC is provided.
If my server extracts data from eBay, it arrives in UTF-8 format, so the only way I can upload that data back to File Exchange is to convert the UTF-8 files extracted from ebay into CP1252 encoding on my server.
When File Exchange accepts the file, eBay's server converts the data to UTF-8 for storage, and thus, submitting UTF data (regardless of CC metadata) will double that conversion, whereas prepending a BOM kills the upload, regardless of CC metadata.
I've gone over this very same scenario in depth with the eBay Advanced Apps team twice in the past 5 years. In the first case, it was blamed on using "Excel" (but my server was creating a raw UTF-8 text file); and the second time I reported, a very helpful staff member took the time to duplicate the problem and test all the scenarios, but nothing has changed. My guess is that the actual difficulties encountered represent a very small fraction of File Exchange users. For instance, you can solve your accent problem by saving your files in ANSI (or converting to ISO-8859-1 or CP1252).
@Anonymous
I think the solution would be some documentation acknowledging this limitation.
Note that File Exchange appears to accept CSV as comma, tab, or semicolon delimited on the US site (haven't tested that spread of features on other sites) and the file extension can be txt or csv.
I have not attempted to use the UTF-8 feature of Excel to create a CSV and have not attempted to upload an xls format. Might be worth testing.
Your observations are correct.
The documentation is incorrect.
The last time I tested, two years ago, the US, CA, AU, UK, DE File Exchange sites allowed limited characters based on ISO-8859-1 language limitations and that is the default format if no CC is provided.
If my server extracts data from eBay, it arrives in UTF-8 format, so the only way I can upload that data back to File Exchange is to convert the UTF-8 files extracted from ebay into CP1252 encoding on my server.
When File Exchange accepts the file, eBay's server converts the data to UTF-8 for storage, and thus, submitting UTF data (regardless of CC metadata) will double that conversion, whereas prepending a BOM kills the upload, regardless of CC metadata.
I've gone over this very same scenario in depth with the eBay Advanced Apps team twice in the past 5 years. In the first case, it was blamed on using "Excel" (but my server was creating a raw UTF-8 text file); and the second time I reported, a very helpful staff member took the time to duplicate the problem and test all the scenarios, but nothing has changed. My guess is that the actual difficulties encountered represent a very small fraction of File Exchange users. For instance, you can solve your accent problem by saving your files in ANSI (or converting to ISO-8859-1 or CP1252).
@Anonymous
I think the solution would be some documentation acknowledging this limitation.
Note that File Exchange appears to accept CSV as comma, tab, or semicolon delimited on the US site (haven't tested that spread of features on other sites) and the file extension can be txt or csv.
I have not attempted to use the UTF-8 feature of Excel to create a CSV and have not attempted to upload an xls format. Might be worth testing.
