Product data can be stored in many formats, for Joomla/Virtuemart this is usually ISO-8895-1 or UTF-8. The Joomla 1.0.x branch stores data in ISO-8895-1 while the Joomla 1.5.x branch stores data in UTF-8 format. The type in which your data is stores is called the encoding.

The encoding of your data determines how it is needs to be handled to show correctly on your screen. A UTF-8 system cannot read ISO-8895-1 correctly and the same goes for an ISO-8895-1 system cannot read UTF-8 data correctly. Trying to attempt to mix encodings will result in strange output this can be missing characters, cut off words, etc. See here the result of different kind of imports:

Handst Handstbe Handstäbe Handstäbe

The only correct import is the 3rd one.

There are 2 situations that can occur:

1. Conversion is not needed
2. Conversion is needed

Conversion is not needed when your data is already encoded the same way as your system. On import do not check the option to convert your data. CSV Improved will import the data without converting.

Conversion is usually needed in the following cases:

• Moving data between Joomla 1.0.x and Joomla 1.5.x
• Data is exported from a different system with different encoding
• Data is saved by another program in a different encoding format

A prerequisite for converting is that the PHP function iconv is either installed or enabled on the system where the data is being imported. In case iconv is not available the data will need to be saved in the correct encoding with a text editor if the file is regular text.

If the system does have iconv installed, CSV Improved can try to convert the data from ISO-8895-1 to UTF-8. The conversion is an attempt thus not guaranteed to work in all cases.

A conversion request can be made on the import page where the file for import is selected.