how do i import emails - what field delimeter is a square

[gazebo]

I've had a quick look at my source spreadsheet in Excel to see if there's anything causing these extra tab characters to appear, but there doesn't appear to be...

The last cell in each record of my email database was a comments field which often had more than one line of text. In Excel it showed as square at the end of each line which appeared to be interpreted as a TAB by phplist, since the information got separated into different records with invalid emails when I imported.

I deleted all the squares I could find and saved the file again. There were still extra records created in phplist as invalid emails. The comments were still on several lines in one cell even though I'd deleted the squares so I guess the new line character was interpreted as a TAB on import.

By the way, it's a bugger when you save your data as .txt from Excel and subsequently want to edit it, you have to reimport it and then things like several lines in one cell get split. What I did was to save information as a csv file (except some formatting doesn't seem to be saved with it), edit it if necessary, and then when finally ok save it as txt before importing to phplist.

[Kelton]

When exporting to a tab delimited text file from Excel, be aware that Excel can dump extra tab characters - seemingly at random - at the end of each line before the return carriage (in the exported text file). <<snip>>

I've had a quick look at my source spreadsheet in Excel to see if there's anything causing these extra tab characters to appear, but there doesn't appear to be...

If your excel spreadsheet has anything in a column to the right of your desired data table, then it will add extra tab characters. If you press <CRTL><END> keys the cursor goes to the end of the worksheet... if it is past the last column of your desired data, then you'll probably get those extra tabs.

My solution... delete those columns to the right of the desired data, shift the cursor back to "home", save the workbook, close it, then re-open it.


I hope it works for you..

regards

[nandoe]

be sure there are not characters used as:

"
:
<space> such as in " abc@ def .biz"
,
;

[shumisha]

You can try have a look at my post:

http://www.phplist.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5085

for CSV import

[ollie]

What a pain the import turned out to be.

I was able to import 27,000 emails very easily. I used a csv file and selected "import emails with different values for attributes".

[jackbremer]

be sure there are not characters used as:

"
:
<space> such as in " abc@ def .biz"
,
;

spot on, hadn't thought to check for : - worked a treat!

Importing a list of 26505 right now, just emails, same values for other fields.

[marcosfernandez]

I want to import my emails addreses from several word documents. Please explain step by step, to convert this documents, because I intent in manny times but comes the "error to read this document".
Thanks.

[dteague]

I followed the steps that Luigi posted but I'm now getting this error:

Fatal Error: Cannot find column with email, please make sure the column is called "email" and not eg e-mail

I'm not sure what to do now.

Thanks Debbie

[H2B2]

I followed the steps that Luigi posted but I'm now getting this error:

Fatal Error: Cannot find column with email, please make sure the column is called "email" and not eg e-mail

Did you check that the file you exported contains the field (column) names in the first row,
and that the field name for email addresses is called email?

[websquad]

phplist will never duplicate an email in the system

Have a newbee question: does this lead me to believe that phpList uses the Email address as the key to its user table? If so, does it normalize the Email string to all lower case as part of the process?

I thought I read somewhere that if you had an established member database, but with some of the members missing attributes, you could import a record for an existing member and insert attributes in place of null values ... true of false?

[H2B2]

phpList uses the Email address as the key to its user table? If so, does it normalize the Email string to all lower case as part of the process?

Yes, the email address is the identifier for a user. Not sure whether case gets changed.
You could run some tests to find out and let us know.

I thought I read somewhere that if you had an established member database, but with some of the members missing attributes, you could import a record for an existing member and insert attributes in place of null values ... true of false?

Yes, that seems to be possible. as described in the docs under the option "Overwrite Existing".
You'd better run some test with this too, to be sure this will do what you expect it to do.

[amoswright]

I was getting frustrated - had a very simple list of approx 15,000 emails, one per line, should work as usual... bud didn't.

Turns out, the list had forbidden characters such as "," ";" ":" "#" or "\t". After deleting them (find/replace), imported fine. I guess the file can't have these characters at all, which I didn't realize (unless you specify one as your delimiter?).

...Probably obvious to most folks, but stumped me for a while... With a long list of user generated emails, I guess there are bound to be a number of typos (i.e. ",com"), so something to keep in mind.

PhpList RULES!

[harikaram]

Hi,

Most of the issues on this post (including strict invalid character checking) can be avoided by choosing the

"import emails with different values for attributes"

option rather than

"import emails with same values for attributes"

...as I've just discovered after an hour of fiddling

And, you have to ensure the email column has the header "email"

The it works like a charm...

-HKS

[soundtherapy]

Hi
I can't import any users list because of this message:
Warning: The temporary directory for uploading is not writable, so import will fail ()

should I contact my server provider?
hope you can help me
thanks

[harikaram]

sounds like a permissions issue. Contact your host support unless you know how to change permissions.