Import fails with certain extended characters in CSV files

Import fails with certain extended characters in CSV files, at least as exported by NeoOffice 1.2 on Macintosh OS X.

CiviCRM v1.5 rev6927

An example file is attached.

As reported on the CRM-Dev list ... on Sept. 25 (my motto: "Eventually."):

NOTE: I solved my own problem, but I'm still reporting it to the development list because it was a huge pain to track down, and I hope to save others the trouble and/or give the developers the info needed to produce a more helpful error message.

I have a problem that stops me at the very import of files. It does not display the lines of the file being compared, which leads me to think that the file is not being imported at all. The file is only 88 KB.

A search for these keywords turned up nothing, however, so it doesn't seem it can be common with the MapField.php file:
CiviCRM warning: array_keys(): The first argument should be an array in MapField.php

It gives the same array error three times: in ".... modules/civicrm/CRM/Import/Form/MapField.php on line 248," line 270, and line 282.

Yet I upgraded from version 1.4 to CiviCRM v1.5 rev6927 (and Drupal to 4.7.3) and I'm getting the same error message I did before.

So the problem would seem to be the CSV files I'm creating with NeoOffice 1.2 (the port of OpenOffice to Mac) from my PayPal history downloads.

Does anyone have any idea what I or CiviCRM are doing wrong? I am following the same procedure that worked for me before.

SOLUTION: Even though I was saving the files as UTF-8, the é in Montréal was coming in, I guess from PayPal, as some devilish symbol. After deleting lines one by one to find where the problem lay, I found this, corrected the symbols to ordinary "e"s (accented probably would have worked, but I don't have time to test anymore).

• ben

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