Advice and answers from the Advanced Web Ranking Team
Special characters are not displayed correctly in CSV
AWR reports and exports use the UTF-8 encoding standard by design. This ensures special characters in keywords or URLs can be parsed correctly by third party software solutions you may be using for viewing or processing the data from these files.
However, opening csv exports with Excel or other data viewers / editors sometimes results in special characters being displayed in a weird way. This happens because files and editors don't play nice when the character encoding is different.
The Fix
Here are some tips to resolve the issue:
use Notepad or Notepad ++ to view or edit the data when opening the csv export with another software, make sure you select UTF-8 encoding.
For example, with Excel you can use the following steps:
Open ExcelImport the data using Data Import External Data Import DataSelect the file type of "csv" and browse to your fileChange the File_Origin in the import wizard to "65001: Unicode (UTF-8)"Change the Delimiter to commaSelect where to import to and Finish
The special characters in keywords and URLs should be displayed correctly.
If you are still experiencing problems, please contact our support team at help@advancedwebranking.com.
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