HELP! ShopSite inserts quote marks/unwanted characters???

[VDCUSA]

Ok- will try to be as clear as possible on this.

I have noticed that ShopSite is inserting quote marks at the beginning and end of database fields when the Product More Info pages are displayed.

I have tracked this now and definitely know I have looked at a SKU in the back office > Products > display product info, and it is fine. At the view, I have enabled the custom product fields. These are used to display additional product data (and some essential product information). Am using a custom template to serve all skus. I have seen the quote marks appear, gone into individual sku view, cleaned the data fields text up and republished, just to see it happen again with next store publish.

At first, I I thought this only occurred with an upload of all products using a file (so maybe the conversion of a spreadsheet to a csv file left some sort of unwanted formatting. makes sense- common headache with microsoft apps).

But, I am certain, it is happening when shopsite publishes, and then generates the page/more info page. I have not pushed up data by external file for weeks now, and it is doing this!

Has anyone else run into this? I am running ShopSite v. 9.0.3 on a VERIO shared web hosting plan, Windows server.

Other stuff: our pages are saved as .asp pages. there are also .aspx pages.

This is so weird. And very aggravating. It is not just a visually ugly thing- if there is simple html in the field, it adds in additional quote marks to it- so that becomes useless. MAJOR issue!

PLEASE say someone has seen or heard of this. I can post screen shots, and provide more detail. Any help greatly appreciated.

This is a MAJOR, HUGE issue. I am days away from go-live, and with 3600+ SKUS i can not keep hand editing this stuff, and republishing each sku.
sigh.
thanks, and I hope someone else is at the office on a Saturday...to see this.

[Jim]

It is not ShopSite that is putting the quote marks in but the application you are saving the tab delimited file from, probably Excel. (open the tab delimited file in Notepad or Word pad and you will see them before it ever gets to ShopSite).

See this knowledge base solution.
http://support.shopsite.com/KBase/questions/1978

[VDCUSA]

Hi Jim. As I said in the post, I thought of that first. But, "I have not pushed up data by external file for weeks now, and it is doing this".

It seems that Shopsite is writing the extra characters on publish.

Thought maybe someone has seen this, or would know if the web form UI of the Back Office is touchy about what text is entered in those datafields. ?huh?
That doesn't make sense.

And if so, how to work around this?
Thanks.

[dortchjm]

I noticed extra quotes in some of my fields earlier this week. I assumed it was left over from using spreadsheets to upload data and had missed it. I'm going to keep an eye out to see if they reappear.

Janice

[VDCUSA]

thanks for the note Janice= I would be very interested in hearing if you see it again. We are going to try pushing the entire 3600+ sku database again this week- and hope nothing too bad happens. I will be hitting this post again if I see it occur again. I don't believe I am "imagining" things...I know i am seeing very strange results, tied directly to immediately following publishing pages at the back office. oh well- maybe we can solve the mystery (which may have everything to do with our unique hosting account, software version, etc)
michelle

[RedSyntax]

I thought I posted this related fustrations, but i guess not. Ok he goes. When pulling the Products table XML file from the Database ( in an effort to build a web interface for updating and editing product data without having to use excel, since excel is obviously the culprit.) various XML parsers complain about the undefined HTML entities that are are a result of quote marks being published and made browser friendly by the "publishing cgi". To make matters strangely worse: it seems these HTML entities ie...“ are causing a cascaded loop where by excel warps the HTML entities in what it understands to be real quotes. Which on publish become HTML entities. Has anyone found an easy way to remove the unwanted quotes from the xml document.

[loren_d_c]

If your parser is saying that these entities are undefined, then it must not be loading the DTD listed at the beginning of the XML, because these common HTML entities are defined in the DTD, for example “ is defined as:

Code: Select all

<!ENTITY ldquo   "“">

If you don't want doublequotes escaped like this, then you should try using regular doublequote characters in your text instead of the high-ascii fancy doublequotes you are currently using (perhaps this is a setting in Excel or Word or whatever app you used to write the text). If these high-ascii characters were not escaped via these entities in the XML then it would make most XML parsers barf.

-Loren

[RedSyntax]

Ok, The dtd is there. maybe the asp.net xmlreader method is in fact ignoring the dtd, that could be possible. In the mean time If you can help me devise a way of removing the entities other than ctrl+f that would be most beneficial and will earn you cool points, loren.