Froogle Feed

[pinbrook]

Has anyone used this yet......??

I have been using the Froogle feed to produce a feed for Kelkoo, with a few adjustments. But i have found that if you import the txt file produced by actinic into Excel as tab delimited it all goes down the toilet when there are returns in the product description.

Obviously I can then strip out all the returns, but I was wondering if this was also causing an issue with importing into Froogle.

Whilst Froogle is still US/dollar based it isn't an issue for UK retailers, but hopefully soon.....

[Jan]

I've used it once ... about two weeks ago - making manual adjustments to remove 0 priced products and to convert my prices to dollars. Haven't had very good results though because I have disappeared from froogle now. :-(

Regards,

[Jan]

I left the currency column in the file, set to GBP which is probably why it failed. I noticed though that the product descriptions are garbled in my file, I use a lot of HTML in my descriptions now and this makes for very strange spacing in the text file.

I got around this by creating a little database with my offer ids and descriptions in it, I then link the actinic generated froogle file into this and another table with a currency conversion rate and then use a query to generate the feed file with the price in dollars and a plain text description. It also give me the ability to remove products that I do not want to appear on the feed. Hopefully this will work very nicely (won't find out until froogle processes the file) and makes is much easier to keep my froogle feed up to date.

In anwser to your original question Jo, I used to find that I could not edit the froogle feed file in excel but do not have any problems doing this in 6.1.3

Regards,

[rmladden]

I got my Froogle password this week and started playing with the file. Unfortunately you cannot take the file as is. The biggest problem is that Actnic does not filter out new line characters from the description. It also includes dummy description products.

You also have to watch what image it includes. In my case, the images are thumbnails (which Froogle does NOT want). My real images are in the extended info section. I got lucky by naming the images the same except by adding a "t" at the end for the thumbnails.

[pinbrook]

goes down the toilet when there are returns in the product description.

The biggest problem is that Actnic does not filter out new line characters from the description

I think it is safe to say that this is a bug!!

you can get around it by find and replace on ^p or ^13 in the meanwhile

[pinbrook]

In anwser to your original question Jo, I used to find that I could not edit the froogle feed file in excel but do not have any problems doing this in 6.1.3

I've only used the Froogle feed in 6.13, but i import it into excel and fiddle with it there

[rmladden]

Froogle just rejected my feed. They said there were line breaks. I did not find any, but I did find another character. It does not show up in Word, but it is a box in Excel and a solid box in notepad.

I think we have a bug. Actinic generated feeds should be clean.

[cdicken]

Hi there

This is a known problem, which will be fixed in 6.1.4 - due out before the end of the year.

[rmladden]

Froogle accepted my feed and my products are in. Now we'll see if anyone actually uses it.

Even with the bug, Actinic's Froogle function makes it a lot easier. I doubt I would have bothered without it.

Yahoo now has something similar (hint).

[Marci]

Possible fix... using some PHP scripting...

<?
$nl = chr(10);
$cr = chr(13);

$cont = str_replace($nl,"newline",$cont);
$cont = str_replace($cr,"carriage_return",$cont);
//Remove carriage returns
$cont = str_replace("carriage_return","",$cont);
//Change "GBP" into Currency as it was easier to match Currencynewline than "GBP"newline
$cont = str_replace("\"GBP\"","Currency",$cont);
//Choose which newlines to keep
$cont = str_replace("Currencynewline","nl_tokeep",$cont);
//Put the newlines you want back
$cont = str_replace("nl_tokeep", "\"GBP\"".$nl,$cont);
//Remove unwanted newlines
$cont = str_replace("newline", " ",$cont);
?>

Martin Jorgensen just knocked that up now (in less than 10 minutes) to automate removal of line breaks etc etc out of our Froogle Feed... he uses it to add our store content to www.PlanetPrices.co.uk

Not sure how you implement it tho, cos I ain't no php-head...

[Marci]

k.... here goes...

set up a cronjob to run the following PHP Code daily (or however frequently you want), and then it'll automatically strip linebreaks out of the file for you live on your server... so generate the Froogle Feed, upload it as additional file with your online store, then edit the following PHP code and set up as cronjob to get it rolling... automated cleaning of Froogle Feed without needing Excel or otherwise...

<?

// Any probs... give marci@over-clock.co.uk a shout 
// and I'll see what I can do to help!
// Coding by James Tingle (virtuanews.com) and 
// Martin Jorgensen (planetprices.co.uk)

// run this command under cron
// php -f path/to/file


// edit this below
$inputurl = 'http://path.to.feedfile/frooglefeed.txt';
$outputpath = 'http://path.to.destination.for.cleaned file/';
// *****

$fp = fopen($inputurl, 'r');

while (!feof($fp)) {
  $cont .= fread($fp, 1024);
}

fclose($fp);

$nl = chr(10);
$cr = chr(13);

$cont = str_replace($nl,"newline",$cont);
$cont = str_replace($cr,"carriage_return",$cont);
//Remove carriage returns
$cont = str_replace("carriage_return","",$cont);
//Change "GBP" into Currency as it was easier to match Currencynewline than "GBP"newline
$cont = str_replace("\"GBP\"","Currency",$cont);
//Choose which newlines to keep
$cont = str_replace("Currencynewline","nl_tokeep",$cont);
//Put the newlines you want back
$cont = str_replace("nl_tokeep", "\"GBP\"".$nl,$cont);
//Remove unwanted newlines
$cont = str_replace("newline", " ",$cont);

$fp = fopen($outputurl, 'w');
fwrite($fp, $cont);
fclose($fp);

?>

[mac]

froogle line breaks

I have 6.1.3 now.
If you upgrade to 6.1.4 or newest version, then there are no line breaks if i export froogle data feed?
would that be automatically be fixed for googla submittal?
Right now, google declined the site because of line breaks in the description.

[rmladden]

Yes, you need at least 6.1.4. I would go straight to 6.1.5.

[Darren B]

Hi All

Just searching for threads on froogle, i have just signed up for the UK beta testing and i have submited my feed 3 times so far and it has failed, spent ages tweaking it so i am hoping it will go this time. Having read through mounds of online help i noticed it does not want the extra headers now, the #quoted=yes bits at the top, i am not sure if this applies to the live US version or just this UK beta. also the layout it suggests are also different to the one actinic outputs, the coloumns have been changed around.

but one thing for you guys, if you use excel it adds " to the text which also gets rejected, when i have finished making changes to the feed in excel i then open it in a text editor and tell it to replace all " with nothing (a blank not the word) this could be a problem for some of you that have been having this problem. Also if you use speach marks in your descriptions.

by the way i am using V7.01

Cheers
Darren