CSV Import - Support for UTF-8 characters in sheets exported from Google Sheets

As far as I understand, Google Sheets always exports CSV as UTF-8 but without the BOM (byte-order-mark) used by applications like Microsoft Excel (and apparently Siteglide import indirectly, though whatever library is used) as an unofficial instruction about the encoding used (not in the CSV spec though).

This means if you have a sheet containing a latin character like:

é

Exporting from Google Sheets and then importing to a webapp/module in Siteglide will mess up the encoding of that character. This is even if the sheet was originally exported from Siteglide and imported into Google Sheets.

This doesn’t happen if Microsoft Excel is used instead of Google Sheets.

A workaround is to after export from Google Sheets, use Microsoft Excel to import as CSV and re-save as UTF-8. It is possible that a workaround is also available using a simple text editor: https://support.google.com/docs/thread/160652357?hl=en&msgid=160669538

However, it would be best if Siteglide could have an option (or an automatic catch) for when importing from Google Sheets which makes the BOM unnecessary.

This is somewhere between a bug and an improvement, since the weakness lies in the CSV spec, but the solution can only be with Siteglide.

Reported by WSI Emagination