[Koha] Byte Order Mark issue importing patrons

[Coehoorn, Joel]

I have a report to export a patron csv file from our student information
system, suitable for use with the koha patron import tool. I want our
librarians to be able to use every semester to import new freshmen and
transfers to koha, without further IT assistance. They run a report, save
it as a CSV file, and use that file for the import.

Unfortunately, in testing this when I go to import the file I get an error
message: "header row could not be parsed". I get an additional error for
every row in the file, which is not surprising given the failure with the
header row. I'm sure you've all heard this one before.

Here's where things get different. I can open the file in Notepad++ and
change the encoding to use not use a byte order mark. I save the *same
file*, import that into koha, and **everything works fine**.  The only
thing different is the lack of a byte order mark.

I cannot cause my reports tool to not use a BOM, and it's asking a lot of
my librarians to edit the CSV file in this way. Is there anything I can do
to tell koha to ignore that BOM? Should this be filed as a bug somewhere?
In searching google on this issue, I think many others may have had this
same problem in the past, but not been able to solve it.

For what it's worth, I'd also love to see a koha stack exchange site, as
these questions are exactly the kind of thing stack exchange excels at
producing solutions for.

  Joel Coehoorn
Director of Information Technology
York College, Nebraska
402.363.5603
jcoehoorn at york.edu



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