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HubSpot import guide

HubSpot import special characters broken / UTF-8 encoding CSV

If names like José, Müller, or O’Connor turn into José, Müller, or O’Connor, the CSV already contains damaged text. Fix the source export before importing it into HubSpot.

What the error means

Broken special characters usually mean the file was saved or reopened with the wrong character encoding. A common pattern is UTF-8 text decoded as Latin-1 or Windows-1252, which turns characters such as é into é and curly apostrophes into ’.

HubSpot will import the text it receives. If the CSV already contains José, HubSpot does not know that the intended name was José.

Why HubSpot imports it as broken text

CSV files do not always carry reliable encoding metadata. Spreadsheet tools can open a source file with one encoding, save it with another, or preserve already-damaged text when exporting a new CSV.

  • Excel exports should use CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) when available.
  • Files from older systems may use Latin-1 or Windows-1252 and need a clean re-export.
  • Once text is mojibake-damaged, a local preflight can warn you, but it cannot reliably recover the original names.

How to fix it manually

  1. Go back to the original source system or spreadsheet before the characters became damaged.
  2. Export the file again as UTF-8. In Excel, choose CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited).
  3. Open the exported CSV in a text editor or preview tool and spot-check names with accents, apostrophes, and non-Latin characters.
  4. If the source system only exports legacy encodings, convert the file to UTF-8 before uploading it to HubSpot.
  5. Do not hand-edit every damaged character unless the file is small enough to review row by row.

How ReadyCSV detects it locally before import

ReadyCSV detects mojibake signatures in headers and cell values and flags them with encoding_mojibake_risk. The warning means the destination will import the damaged text as-is unless you re-export or repair the source file first.

ReadyCSV's parser strips a UTF-8 byte-order mark and chooses among comma, semicolon, and tab delimiters, so common Excel and regional CSV layouts can be parsed locally. That parsing support is not the same as repairing already-damaged character data.

The check runs in your browser. ReadyCSV does not upload your CSV, send contact names to a server, or claim to reconstruct the original special characters automatically.

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Check your CSV before importing

ReadyCSV preflights HubSpot contact CSVs locally in your browser. Your CSV contents stay on your device: no upload, no account, no AI calls, and no license server call for local checks.

It is still your responsibility to review every finding, cleaned export, Issue Report, and HubSpot import setting before importing. ReadyCSV cannot guarantee that HubSpot will accept every row.

Open ReadyCSV local preflight