The problem of the Arabic language in export and import

Installing my Dolibarr
1

I exported my clients to Excel 2007. I tried importing them to another hosting account, but the client name didn’t appear despite the process being complete. The client name field is empty,

while the mobile number appears normally.

The language used is Arabic.

When I open the Excel file, the name appears correctly.

The problem occurs in Dolibar when importing the file.

2025-12-22_143122
2025-12-22_1431221669×930 210 KB

Thank you for your support

2

sounds like the mapping wasn’t working correctly but you can give it another try just with some key field and the company name.

1 Like
3

It’s probably a language encoding problem… but I don’t know the solution.!

4

can you enter the companies name manually?

5

Hello,

Did you try importing with XLSX or CSV file ?

1 Like
6

You must set the language encoding type of your import file to “UTF8 with Product Recipe”. This will prevent charset corruption and whitespace generation.

2 Likes
7

I tried all the formats available in the program.

8

After exporting the file, how do I convert it to UTF8 encoding?

9

if on Linux, try using iconv? @xshop

1 Like
10

The products were successfully translated and imported into Arabic. The problem is with customer names; they are rejected or appear blank.

11

if you create a company in dolibarr, export it, delete that company, and the re-imports it - does the name then work or not?

12

I don’t know the answer; I haven’t tried doing that.

13

Hi @xshop,

Here is an easy method to convert your exported Excel file to UTF-8:

Using Notepad++ (Windows)

  1. Download Notepad++ (free) if you don’t have it
  2. First, save your Excel file as CSV:
    • In Excel: File → Save As → CSV (Comma delimited)
  3. Open the CSV file in Notepad++
  4. Go to Encoding menu → Convert to UTF-8 (or UTF-8-BOM if the first one doesn’t work)
  5. Save the file
  6. Import into Dolibarr

Note: The standard “CSV (Comma delimited)” option in Excel does NOT preserve UTF-8 encoding for Arabic characters.

Quick verification

To check if your conversion worked:

  • Open the CSV file in Notepad++ or any text editor
  • You should see Arabic names displayed correctly
  • If you see strange characters (like �� or ???), the encoding is still wrong

Let me know if this solves your problem!

1 Like
14

The Excel file was exported in CSV format with UTF-8 encoding and verified using Notepad++. However, when importing the file, the client’s name doesn’t appear. I can send you the Excel file privately so you can confirm this.

Thank you very much for your reply and support.

15

Excel might not do it exactly… try this or attach the file here.

Windows Notepad.

resim
resim636×378 74.5 KB

resim
resim599×169 9.19 KB

and re-imprort

16

Hi @xshop,

Yes feel free to send me a copy of that Excel file. And remind the version of your Dolibarr instance.
I’ll let you know, if can reproduce this error, what the problem is.

Massaoud