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I am using this method to export HTML Tables to Excel. However some of the colums in my data have < characters. This cause an error when I try to open the file in Excel. Is there some way to ignore these characters or automatically replace them? Eg:

<tr>
<td>Assume A>B</td>
</tr>

PS: I already have the html data with < character. I am pulling it into a new page, which has a button to export it to excel (using xml format).

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2 Answers 2

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I am not aware of any solution to the problem mentioned by you. However a workaround can be to write a small data sanitation script using Perl/sed to sanitize your data. The details of such a script might be taken from here.

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MS-Excel in general has no problem with the '<' character. HTML applications however tend to interprete the '<' character as start of an HTML tag.

You can replace the character by &lt; during the export and import, and replace this back to '<' when in Excel.

Or you can make sure that text fields are quoted during the process.

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I already have the html data with < character. I am pulling it into a new page, which has a button to export it to excel (using xml format). Edited the Question to add the same info.

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