I can't export my books

Opened a new thread for that because the previous one about exporting troubles did not quite match my experience.

When I click on "export all books", the number climbs to 980 books (my total amount right now) in a matter of minutes, then nothing happens, even after an hour or so. I tried several times on different days, on three different computers and on both Firefox and Chrome.

Which format(s) have you tried?

To make sure I understand this, you go to the Import/Export page, select your format, wait for the "N books processed" to reach the total number of books in your library, but never get the "Processing done, click to download" link? I've just tested all four formats on my own library (which is a little larger than yours) and everything worked okay, so it sounds like it's maybe a problem with a recently-added book. Have you tried doing a filtered export to narrow down which book or books may be causing the problems?

This is correct, I never get the download link.

I had only tried excel. It actually works with exporting as a tab-delimited text but I don't like the resulting file (and it butchers diacritics, not sure if it's a problem with the file format or the export itself). It "works" with MARC and JSON too, in that it generates a file, but I did not try to open it.

So the problem seems to be generating the Excel file.

I'll try a filtered export later, I'm at work.

My guess is that the tab-delimited text is fine but that you need to import it into Excel to view it properly. (I don't use Excel so I can't guide you through that. Look for something like Data/Import from file in the menus.)

If one uses Excel, it is a simple process. Open the file and it will look like a spread sheet. Simply save it as a 2??? spreadsheet where 2??? is the Excel version you are running 2007, 2008, etc.

Added: I didn't read >3 Kuiperdolin: so you clearly understand what is going on. I'm sure characters in languages other than English may drive Excel nuts. I'm a one trick pony: English.

>5 ulmannc: With English text you're right and I _think_ that Excel will also guess the format (character set, delimitor character, etc) when you use it to open a tab-delimited text file. But >3 Kuiperdolin: mentions that it "butchers diacritics" and that's the kind of complaint I get from people opening utf-8 unicode files in programs that expect latin-1 or similar, so until we get a more detailed bug report, that's my guess.

Thanks for help folks.

So, in no particular order :

I can import the txt file in Excel but the spécial characters are still screwed

I can indeed export subsets of my librart directly in Excel by using filters

Exporting in Excel does not wreck the special characters.

Through trial and error I have pinpointed the faulty book : https://www.librarything.com/work/331532/summary/71990379 . Even exporting just this single book caused the problem.

The book in question had an equal sign (=) in my review and once I removed it on a hunch, it could be exported in Excel, along with the rest.

So I guess what's left of the bug is this :

Special characters are screwy when I export my collection as a txt file

The site hangs when trying to exporting in Excel a book with a review including an equal sign.

>7 Kuiperdolin: I have no problem with special characters when I import files downloaded from LT into Excel (2010, V14).

When importing into Excel it is important make sure that the 'file origin' (shown in step one on the import text wizard) is set correctly. I don't know if Excel makes any attempt to check the format of the file but the default when I use it seems to be 'Windows (ANSI)'. I change this, from the long drop down list of options offered, to '65001 : Unicode (UTF-8)' and the files import without problems. You can see in the preview window if the characters are going to display correctly when uploaded.

I import the .tsv offered by LT directly into Excel, rather than convert it to a .txt file, but this shouldn't make a difference to the import results.

I'm sure I've been able to import LT files using earlier versions of Excel. The procedure may have been slightly different but somewhere in the process you have the option of setting the format of the file that is being imported.

>7 Kuiperdolin: I'll buy the explanation about one book making the export hang.

There are lots of other weirdnesses that might cause havoc. I have 29 books where the exported record is not even utf-8 (due to Subject coming from various sources and "converted" by using a shovel?)).

I'm still curious about the spécial cháracters being scréwý. One possibility is that the source it was imported from had it wrong?

My German language library sends emails that have some Umlauts show correctly and others not. Most of these characters have various ways of being encoded. But for a normal user it is hard to say how a specific character looks 'underneath'.

Closing as duplicate of https://www.librarything.com/topic/229303 and making note of this thread there.