How to Import Products with ™ & ® Symbols in Magento 2?

The following article is based on the StackExchange question by Ronak. The author has products with symbols like ™ and ® which should be used in any case.  If you try to import products to Magento 2 with the following symbols, but the system displays the “General system exception happened” error on “Check Data”, you’ve come to the right place. Below, we shed light on the problem.

According to Ronak, you can solve the aforementioned error by removing the same symbols. The file is validated successfully, but our goal is to import products with ™ and ®.

To achieve this goal, Raphael at Digital Pianism proposes to fix the problem caused by unsupported characters. He recommends using their HTML equivalents. For instance, it is possible to replace “™” with “™” and “®” with “®”

To find out more characters, follow this link.

At the same time, Khoa TruongDinh proposes using HTML Entities Encoder / Decoder to encode and decode a piece of text to its HTML equivalent.

Also, note that this approach may lead to some problems. According to Fabian Schmengler,

using HTML encoded characters as suggested above works for fields that allow HTML: product descriptions and other WYSIWYG fields. Unfortunately, the aforementioned approach won’t help you with product names. Indeed, you will see the plain text “™” instead of the trade symbol In invoice PDFs if the name is imported with “™”.

To solve the problem, Fabian proposes encoding the input file in UTF-8. Use a text editor like Notepad++ to detect and convert character encoding. Note that it is necessary to use UTF-8 without BOM.

To make the import process even better, we recommend you to use the Improved Import & Export Magento 2 extension. You will still need to encode your input files, but the speed of the import will be dramatically increased. Besides, you can create schedules to run product import automatically according to the plan. For further information about the plugin, follow the link below:

Download/Buy Improved Import & Export Magento 2 Extension

We hope the article was useful. For other Magento 2 tips, check our Cookbook.