Importing products via Feeds csv import is generating error: “General error: 1366 Incorrect string value:”

Question

I'm trying to import products using the import via csv functionality within feeds and am getting the following errors:

SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1366 Incorrect string value: '\xB7 The ...' for column 'field_description_value' at row 1
Error message SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1366 Incorrect string value: '\xB7 The ...' for column 'message' at row 1

I also have the commerce-feeds module installed.

There is quite a lot of stuff on this on drupal.org, but it all seems to be contradictory and I am more than a little lost. I am a non-coder and a relatively inexperienced configurator at best.

My csv is definitely encoded UTF-8. I have opened it in Notepad++ and converted it to UTF-8.

I found this post on stack overflow utf-8 database problem The line "It seems your connection is not set to UTF8 but some other 8 bit encoding like ISO Latin" seems to indicate to me that there may be a bug in the Feeds or Commerce Feeds modules in that the database connection cannot cope with csv input files encoded UTF-8. Could that be correct?

I'd really appreciate some sage advice on this. I am completely stuck.

Answer 1

Maybe the csv is encoded in UTF8, but everything else needs to be UTF8: UTF8 all the way through

I don't know exactly in what step is failing, did you check the databases and tables collation?
Drupal has by default the "SET NAMES="utf8", http://drupal.org/node/310447

Hopefully the Feeds maintainers have a look to your case here. http://drupal.org/node/1140194 , it seems you are not alone.