Hi everyone,
I am trying to link LimeSurvey to our Sona Systems subject pool by (amongst others) uploading a participant list form Sona Systems to LimeSurvey. The participant list Sona Systems provides is a CSV file with double quotes around the values. According to LimeSurvey this should work:

File should be a standard CSV (comma delimited) file with optional double quotes around values (default for most spreadsheet tools)

However, if I try to upload the file, I always get the following error:

1 lines had a mismatching number of fields.

(the participant list I used as a test has only one entry).

As soon as I remove the double quotes around the values the upload works without any problem. I also tried this with a minimal CSV that only includes first name, last name and email address (see attached files), which leads to the same problem.

Has somebody else encountered this problem or can replicte it? Or am I missing something else here?

LimeSurvey version?

Your csv_quotes seems to contain this.
So I should consider this as only one entry because of the surrounding quotes
"""John"",""Doe"",""jdoe@test.com"""

After having removed these surrounding quotes, and leaving the double double quotes I got
""John"",""Doe"",""jdoe@test.com""


remaining double double quotes.

Cleaning the file to only "double quotes"
"John","Doe","jdoe@test.com"



So, in my opinion this is correct behaviour.

This phrase

File should be a standard CSV (comma delimited) file with optional double quotes around values (default for most spreadsheet tools

seems to mean:
Double quotes work, single quotes do not.

A file with single quotes
'John','Doe','jdoe@test.com'
is imported as


Joffm

That makes sense. I guess opening it in the txt editor first instead of Excel would have helped. For future reference if anybody stumbles into this: CSV files automatically escape manually placed quotes when saved ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values#Basic_rules ). This added the extra quotes in this example.

That also goes for my original participant list from Sona Systems: Sona Systems exports the CSV with an extra line on top saying "Participants". I opened it in Excel to delete the first line, but this lead Excel to drop the quotes for the fist value. Excel then subsequently tried to escape all other quotes in the above manner. Opening and editing the file in txt prevents this.

Thanks again Joffm for your help!

Therefore we do not recommend EXCEL to handle csv-files.
Better OpenOffice, LibreOffice, etc..

Joffm