Google Base Encoding Errors - One Mystery Solved!

[FiberGuy]

Greetings boardies...

For those that use the bulk upload to Base/Froogle, I've finally solved a mystery that has had me perplexed ever since FROOGLE became BASE.  Roughly 15% of our listing were getting encoding errors and I couldn't figure out why.  I'll explain why we were getting the errors and how to correct it below:

If you use any special characters in your titles, product description... anywhere in the spreadsheet (or text file) such as:

¼
©
é
ñ
°
¾

... or a host of others, Google balks and returns an error. 

You have two solutions (there may be others, I'm sure)... rewrite your descriptions to accomodate Google (I don't think so!)

Or, what I've chosen to do is each time I do an upload (about once every 2-3 weeks), I do a find and replace for the most common offenders (in our case it was the fractions) and replace them with standard characters.  IE  ¼ to 1/4 

Don't forget to add spaces where necessary or you may get something like this:  12½ changes to 121/2

If that doesn't work, clear your cache and restart your computer. 

Cheers