Exporting to Excel gives a bad record

Just reporting that one of my books seems to trigger a bug in the Excel export. (I'll just use one of the other export formats,)

When I try to export my library in xls format the records starting with Book ID 22204952 are missing some of the fields. When I try to export just the book with Book ID 22204952 I get a file that libre office shows as empty.

Excel export All exports seem to be stalled out at the moment, at least on my end in Chrome (trying both your account and my own). Looking.

Okay, @ccatalfo was able to fix this Wednesday afternoon, if you want to give it another go! Let me know if you come across further issues. Thanks for your patience.

Thanks. I can export some of my records as excel. So a filtered export of "1001 nat" gives a nice excel file. But if I try to export the whole catalog I get a 62656512 bytes file that I can't open in libre office calc and looks like it is corrupt.
A filtered export of "Generalisation af Gruppebegrebet" gives a small excel file that I can't open in libre office calc.

So I still have issues with the excel export, although I can export some of the books just fine.

ETA: my secret plan is to export as xls and save it as csv and look for any differences between that and the TSV export.
The small sample with "1001 nat" looks fine in that respect, but it is only a tiny fraction of my catalog.

>4 bnielsen: Darn. Okay, I'm going to reopen this and bug @ccatalfo about it soon. Thanks for your patience!

>5 kristilabrie: No problem. I just like to play around with the various formats. Some of my books have large reviews and they break the Marc export. Excel seems to handle large reviews with lots of line breaks just fine, so I'm not sure what goes wrong here. I suspect some kind of programming error since it seems that an error spoils the rest of the export file? Thanks for looking into it.

Bump!

And another user met the same bug, I think:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/364928#8727921

I was able to make (some slight) progress, at least with @kac522's Excel export issues reported at https://www.librarything.com/topic/364928.

Since their library is private, I'll just note that book id 78575459 seems to be the culprit causing the Excel export to fall apart. (I thought it might have been a different author with some non-English characters, but no.) I'm not sure exactly where, yet, but it seems that part of the Dewey Wording field for this record was parsing out into the next record (as its title), and that's where the data started to fall apart on subsequent records in the export. (Missing title/author, much of the other data in the following records.)

>8 kristilabrie: Thanks for the research. I added this book most probably by using the ISBN or the title/author in the "Add books" screen using "Amazon.com" as the source. Let me know where I should edit the record to clean it up.

Or would it be better to delete the book and then re-add with a source other than amazon?

ETA: I've identified the book as The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James--is that correct?

>9 kac522: That's the one. I might try deleting it altogether and adding from a different source, BUT it might actually be more helpful if you wanted to tinker with editing one suspicious field at a time on the existing record first to see if there's an issue with just one of the fields for that record.

If you wanted to play with the latter option, you could edit a field and then use the "Export filtered" option on the Excel export, searching for the specific book id (to export just that one record). If you still get the warning from Excel that data has been lost, you'll know the change didn't do anything. Totally fine if you'd rather just delete and add anew from a different source!

Let me know how it goes, if you can get the error to clear!

>10 kristilabrie: Since I'm not that confident in my ability to carefully edit bit by bit, I probably won't go that route.

I will start by:

1. Deleting that book
2. Running the full Export to see if it works.

If that's successful, I will:

1. Add the book back to a smaller collection
2. Run Export just on that collection and see how it goes.

Sound OK?

>10 kristilabrie: I can reproduce this.
Add books / source: Amazon.com books / search for Black Jacobins

Chose the "Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James" adding it to your library

Exporting this single book as Excel gives me an 9728 bytes long librarything_bnielsen.xls

which doesn't contain much according to Libreoffice Calc.

I suspect the contents of the Subjects field:
Fran𣯩s Dominique

or in octal mode:

F r a n 360 243 257 251 s D o m i n q u e\n

but it is impossible to edit the Subjects field.

>12 bnielsen: That was my guess, too, the weird Subject (especially since that field started the fallout of the rest of the export, from that record). Thanks for doing further testing!