Symptoms
- “Illegal quoting on line”
- “Missing or stray quote on line”
- Unexpected characters or shifted columns after saving in a spreadsheet editor
Common causes
- Curly quotes pasted into CSV fields
- An unescaped quote inside a quoted field
- A file saved in a legacy encoding instead of UTF-8
- A delimiter or newline embedded without valid CSV quoting
How to check
- Confirm the file decodes as UTF-8
- Inspect the reported row and its surrounding rows
- Check that quoted fields use paired straight double quotes
- Compare the row width with the header
How to fix
- Save a backup, then export the file as UTF-8 CSV
- Replace curly quotes only where they are data punctuation
- Escape literal double quotes inside quoted fields
- Re-export from a CSV-aware editor instead of editing raw delimiters blindly
Prevention
- Keep an untouched platform export as a template
- Run a local preflight after the final spreadsheet save
- Avoid changing delimiter or locale settings mid-workflow
Evidence and scope
This page passed TinkerVane's Evidence Gate: a documented real problem, clear search intent, a matching file-level capability, a duplicate-content check, and an explicit overclaim boundary.