We have a form data that is giving us problems when we export responses from Form Assembly-- is there a way we can restrict special characters from being used in our forms?
For example, a user entered "Clínica Alemana" for their Organization, and the í ends up getting mistranslated when we export to CSV and import the data into our CRM.
We have designated the UTF-8 character set on the page hosting the form: https://secureweb.jax.org/jaxmice/2011calendarRequest.html
In looking at this further the issue appears to be that Excel does not handle the special characters well when opening the CSV (neither does Access).
I believe a regular expression is going to be the solution here, because Alphanumeric is too restrictive for our purposes (we want to allow dashes and periods).
What would the regular expression look like for allowing a-z, 0-9, plus periods, dashes, and slashes (/) ?
Before resorting to a RegExp, have you tried making sure you're not seeing the dreaded 'MS Excel won't handle Unicode' bug: http://www3.formassembly.com/blog/support-documentation/troubleshooting/troubleshooting-export-issues/
Usually if you just use the Data Import wizard from Excel, you can tell it to interp the data properly UTF-8/16, and everything will work out ok.
Failing that, you can try importing it into a decent spreadsheet app, like Google Spreadsheet and export it out again to something closer to the format you need.
Failling all that, a regexp would depend on if you're wanting to use it on a textarea as well as a textfield.
Yes, the workaround we found was to import as UTF8, save as UTF16, then import into Excel.
On Windows site we had to find a 3rd party text editor, but we did find a free one (textpad) and saving it as "Unicode (big endian)" did the trick.
I'm hopeful that connecting formassembly to silverpop directly via HTTP Post connector will eliminate this issue altogether, I am going to test that next week.