I have a data export views display with a mandatory telephone field. When exporting the data to xls/xlsx file, sometimes the phone number becomes empty.
I change to JSON format and found there are Unicode direction control characters \u202d, \u202c surrounding the phone number, no matter it's in plain text or telephone link format. Not sure which mobile or browser add them when filling in the field, however, the direction control is used to keep the phone showing in the right direction in Arabic locale.
Those phone number with the direction control cannot export correctly into xls file, and I'd like to discuss should the issue resolved by sanitizing it in views_data_export module or propose another formatter to the telephone field in core.
This is a sample of data from my view
{
"RID":"1",
"FullName":"\u97cb\u5fd7\",
"Email":"somebody@example.com",
"Cellphone":"\u202d0912-345-6789\u202c",
"Attendance":"Attended"
}
Closed: works as designed
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It's likely this issue predates Contrib.social: some issue and comment data are missing.
I'd humbly suggest that this is a job for a field formatter: to remove the extra characters that you don't want. If however, that it's specifically that the Excel exported that is mangling the data, then maybe comment here and move the issue over to the XLS Serialization issue queue.