Importing CSV with special character enclosing fields

[Cesar Covarrubias]

I have been tasked with migrating some projects from Mantis to JIRA, but with some restrictions:

1. None of the custom fields in Mantis should be brought over (we are trying to clean up our bug tracking instances)
2. Only public comments should be brought over

Given these 2 requirements, I have been forced to use a CSV import. The issue I am having is importing the comments in. Our comments have special characters in it, including apostrophes, quotes, parens, greater/less than, etc. The only character the comments don't have is the backtick (`). When I do my export from MySQL i am using this backtick to enclose each field, separating them with commas.

Is it possible to specify to the JIRA CSV importer which character is enclosing the comments?

[Pawel Niewiadomski · Accepted solution]

No, it's not possible. You always use " to surround the text and then you can put anything inside.

Check the documentation for details https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Importing+Data+from+CSV#ImportingDatafromCSV-Treatingspecialcharactersliterally

But I wonder why did you decide to go with CSV.

I think the easiest option in your case would be to copy Mantis database, then delete all the stuff you don't want and import it from there.

Have you tried this approach?

[Cesar Covarrubias]

The Mantis database is huge and we are doing this on a project by project basis, so it would be a long arduous practice to have to delete everything from the db every project. I will check the documentation again to see if there is an easier way of handling my data. Thanks Pawel!