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Copying text from website to excel strange format

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    Post Copying text from website to excel strange format

    Hello All

    Thank you in advance for any assistance.

    When copying text (in this case product ingredients) from a webpage to a cell in excel, the text copies ok, but as soon as we try to wrap the text to fit, it goes into a strange format. No amout of paste special or different formatting makes any difference. Please see the example attached of when copied into excel. The text in cell A2 is when pasted. The text in cell A5 is once the wrap function has been applied

    I assume this is a website format code issue but when copied into word, it looks fine, but excel just doesn't like it. Is this a common problem that can be resolved or a specific website issue?

    Many thanks
    G1
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    Re: Copying text from website to excel strange format

    What is the URL for the website. We may be able to offer suggestions if we know the website.
    Alan עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי


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    Re: Copying text from website to excel strange format

    Many of the characters you are getting from the web site are not ASCII characters, they are some extended character set. For example, "Wheat Flour" is not ASCII text with a bold format, it is completely different characters that are part of a bold character set. The odd character codes disrupt Excel's coding to format the text into a wrapped cell. This is pretty much a specific web site issue.

    Is it a public site, or do you need a login? Please provide the URL for the text you copied here.

    Here are the individual characters with their Unicode codes, and things get bad when we hit Wheat Flour:

    character set.jpg
    Jeff
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    Re: Copying text from website to excel strange format

    Good afternoon Alan and thank you for your help. The url is:

    https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p.../4088600483474

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    Re: Copying text from website to excel strange format

    Good afternoon Jeff, thank you for your help with this. The URL is:

    https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p.../4088600483474

    Many thanks
    G1

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    Re: Copying text from website to excel strange format




    Access Denied
    Error 16
    groceries.aldi.co.uk
    2024-10-09 15:26:07 UTC
    What happened?
    This request was blocked by our security service
    Your IP: 108.28.244.78
    Proxy IP: 45.60.151.100 (ID 101842-100)
    Incident ID: 1842000250061637545-139677275799029374

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    Re: Copying text from website to excel strange format

    I was able to reach it through my VPN using a UK server. I don't know why I was blocked. Stand by.

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    Re: Copying text from website to excel strange format

    The text is directly entered in the web site code like that. The only way I know of to load it into Excel as ASCII text is to translate it character-by-character. I suppose this could be done with VBA, but there is no simple way to just paste in the text and have it work. As far as Excel knows, the text that appears as Wheat Flour (just as one example) could be Chinese, Arabic, or gibberish. It does not know that those codes have any relationship to the letters "Wheat Flour". I am not familiar with the character set they are using, so even to write VBA to do this would require (for me) a lot of research so I'm not really equipped to do this myself.

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    Re: Copying text from website to excel strange format

    Just for shiitakes and giggles, here is how the Forum software interprets those character codes:

    Vegetables (55%) (Cabbage, Mung Beansprouts, Carrot, Green Pepper, Shiitake Mushroom, Onion), Filo Pastry (34%) (퐖퐡퐞퐚퐭 퐅퐥퐨퐮퐫, Fully Refined 퐒퐨퐲퐚 Oil, Salt), Fully Refined 퐒퐨퐲퐚 Oil, 퐒퐨퐲 Sauce (Water, 퐒퐨퐲퐚 Bean, 퐖퐡퐞퐚퐭 퐅퐥퐨퐮퐫, Salt), Sugar, Corn Starch, Garlic, Salt, 퐒퐞퐬퐚퐦퐞 퐎퐢퐥, White Pepper, Potato Starch.

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    Re: Copying text from website to excel strange format

    Also blocked. Don't have UK server as does Jeff, so I am leaving this up to others.

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    Re: Copying text from website to excel strange format

    Hello

    Tank you for taking the time to explain. I guess it's just one of those things and we'll have to either type outthe characters manually, or we will just copy the ingredients as a picture and past into Excel. Thank you all for looking into it for me.
    Take care all

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    Re: Copying text from website to excel strange format

    Thank you for looking into it for me :-)

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    Re: Copying text from website to excel strange format

    Quote Originally Posted by 6StringJazzer View Post
    Just for shiitakes and giggles, here is how the Forum software interprets those character codes:

    Vegetables (55%) (Cabbage, Mung Beansprouts, Carrot, Green Pepper, Shiitake Mushroom, Onion), Filo Pastry (34%) (퐖퐡퐞퐚퐭 퐅퐥퐨퐮퐫, Fully Refined 퐒퐨퐲퐚 Oil, Salt), Fully Refined 퐒퐨퐲퐚 Oil, 퐒퐨퐲 Sauce (Water, 퐒퐨퐲퐚 Bean, 퐖퐡퐞퐚퐭 퐅퐥퐨퐮퐫, Salt), Sugar, Corn Starch, Garlic, Salt, 퐒퐞퐬퐚퐦퐞 퐎퐢퐥, White Pepper, Potato Starch.
    I thought I'd try and translate back the first group of oriental looking characters. The results weren't what I expected.
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    Re: Copying text from website to excel strange format

    For what it's worth, I didn't have any problem accessing the website/URL.

    I copied the text of the recipe into MS Word and into Excel. I also copied the text from Word into Excel. The Word version looks best.
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