Dear Helpers,

Sorry if duplicate but I did not find a solution yet. I have made a small pre-test in order to see whether all is in order before launching the survey. However, when I try to export responses I encounter a small problem that seems to come from multi-lined responses to open questions.

When a participant has added several "returns" in his response, they are not "escaped" in the final export. In CSV, it logically creates a new line as if it was a new participant (but with only the continuation of the response for that inexistant participant), and in Excel it simply does not appear anywhere (note that in HTML or directly online all is fine).

With the pre-test I can simply edit the CSV file with Notepad++, but when I will launch the survey I will have way more respondents. Any idea of what can be done?

Thanks in advance,

Maxime

What version of LimeSurvey are you using?

LimeSurvey Pro (I think it is called), I am exporting directly frome LimeQuery

Unfortunately many survey tools show this behaviour when exporting to csv.

But I do not see an issue exporting to EXCEL.






Joffm

[strike]When I directly export results to an Excel file, the issue in my case is that the part of the response that comes after the new line is just deleted, then it continues with the other responses. So I have the first part but not the following part (with your example, it would stop at "This is a long text with").

An when I import the CSV file in Excel, as I wrote, the first column shows the new lines as..new lines (and thus new user - so with your example, I would have
id
1
some carriage return
This is...
(...)
2
3
...)[/strike]***

I could still use the search+replace advanced featues of N++ to remove the lines, but I would greatly appreciate it if there was an option (maybe it already exists) to do it directly when exporting.

*** Edit : Sorry, actually this was due to the file being in protected mode, when I directly export to Excel it works as expected indeed. It is still an issue with CSV though

For VV edition : i always use LibreOffice calc.

Excel is a dumb tool for CSV

Thanks for the tip. Actually I was planning to use R to import/clean/analyze data (that is why I was first trying to export as CSV), and R has a library to import Excel files, so it should work (but I havn't tried yet). Worst case I'll use LO indeed (but again, if LSurvey could have an option to export to CSV with replacing new lines with a space, it would be great)

Best : use R export plugin …

manual.limesurvey.org/Export_responses#Export_R

Thanks, I juste used it and it works like a charm! No need for a CSV anymore