I am working on a project that uses a CSV file supplied by the client to populate a database. The client is to create the spreadsheet, then save it as a CSV to be uploaded, which is then parsed into a database.
The problem is, whenever the client saves the excel spreadsheet as an MS-DOS .csv file, many of the special characters get converted to question marks "?" (symbols such as ' " / ). However, if we then open the CSV file and manually replace each ? with the right character it works fine.
The problem is that the data file is HUGE, and we can't reasonably do this, so I was hoping there was a way to save it. We have tried exporting as Unicode and ASCII to no avail. We have also tried uploading to google docs, and re-saving, however, it also breaks those characters.