Regarding the new collection export

Thank you so much, Webflow, for the newly introduced feature enabling the export of a collection - this is brilliant!
However, it would be very helpful if that can include also an option to specify the separator character. As some collection fields may contain text information which can include commas (such as product descriptions), these are currently interpreted as separators and thus make the exported CSV broken up and unusable. I believe, using TAB as separator would solve this, so this would be great as an option…

Thanks for considering :slight_smile:

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Hi @Pataka – we’re so glad to hear you’re excited about the new CMS to CSV Export feature!

Sorry to hear you’re experiencing issues with the exported file format. Are you natively parsing the exported CSV yourself, or using a spreadsheet tool?

If you’re using a spreadsheet tool, it should correctly put your strings in the correct cell. From there you can use the spreadsheet tool (like Google Sheets) to export the CSV to TSV.

Hope you find this workaround helpful!

Hi @anonymon, thanks for replying!
Yes, I do open the exported CSV using Excel, or Libre Office dialogue. Attached is what it looks like - you can see an example of a text field content split in two columns since the comma occurring in the text (a product description) is interpreted as a column delimiter.
I hope this screenshot illustrates the problem…

Thank you :slight_smile:

One thing to add: checking the “Quoted field as text” doesn’t make any difference.

OK - my apologies. I should have experimented more in advance.
Specifying the Text delimiter to double quotes " instead of single ’ makes the difference! Then the text fields are correctly interpreted as text strings, including any commas in it, and they stay together!
All complaints withdrawn!! :smiley:
Thanks again!

Glad you were able to make this work!!