Shopify 'Missing or stray quote on line': causes and the fix
UPDATED 3 MIN READBY THE SCENOX COMMERCE TEAM
SHORT ANSWER
'Missing or stray quote on line' means a quote character is in the wrong place on the line Shopify names. Excel's curly quotes are the usual cause, followed by unescaped double quotes and fields that never close. Replace curly quotes with straight ones and double any quote inside a field.
ON THIS PAGE
"Missing or stray quote on line" is the more specific cousin of the illegal quoting error. Shopify has found a quote character where it should not be, or has not found one where it should. The fix takes minutes once you know what to search for. The wider list of errors is in the Shopify CSV import errors guide.
What the message means
In CSV, a field that contains a comma, a line break or a double quote has to be wrapped in straight double quotes. A quote inside such a field has to be doubled. If either rule is broken, the parser loses track of where fields start and end.
Shopify's help page ties this error to spreadsheet programs such as Excel inserting curly quotes, and to extra quote marks in a field. The advice there is to use a text editor, swap curly quotes for straight ones and remove stray ones from the line named.
Causes
- Curly quotes from Excel, Word or a CMS export, either wrapping a field or sitting inside a description.
- Unescaped inch marks and quoted words in body text, such as 12" or "limited edition".
- A field opened with a quote and never closed, often at a line break in a pasted description.
- Doubled quotes in the wrong place, usually after someone "fixed" a file by hand.
- A trailing quote after the last column left by a find and replace.
- Quotes inside tags or option values, which are easy to miss because they are short fields.
Broken row and fixed row
The first row uses curly quotes around the description and a stray quote at the end of the tags field.
Broken:
Handle,Title,Body (HTML),Vendor,Tags
oak-stool,Oak Stool,“<p>Seat height 24" in a "natural" finish</p>”,Northwind,"seating, oak""
Fixed:
Handle,Title,Body (HTML),Vendor,Tags
oak-stool,Oak Stool,"<p>Seat height 24"" in a ""natural"" finish</p>",Northwind,"seating, oak"
The fixed row uses straight quotes to wrap the field, doubles the inner quotes and removes the extra quote after the tags.
Step-by-step fix
- Copy the original file somewhere safe.
- Open the CSV in a text editor that shows line numbers and go to the line Shopify names.
- Replace all curly quotes in the file with straight ones, using find and replace.
- Read that line field by field. Mark where each field starts and ends.
- Double any quote that sits inside a field. Remove any quote that sits between fields.
- If the line looks right, look at the line before it. An unclosed quote earlier on shifts the error downwards.
- Check that the file is saved as UTF-8 with commas as separators.
- Re-import a small slice, then the rest.
Prevention
Edit in Google Sheets and export, rather than re-saving a CSV from Excel. Run a find for curly quotes whenever you paste descriptions from a PDF or a supplier site. If your descriptions contain HTML, prefer HTML entities for quotes inside attributes and body text, so the CSV never has to carry them.
A quick scripted check also helps: parse the file with any CSV library and confirm every record has the same number of columns. That finds unclosed quotes immediately.
When to do it yourself and when to hand it off
One bad line in a small file is a five-minute job. Do it yourself. If your supplier data is full of pasted text, mixed quoting and long descriptions, cleaning it by hand turns into days. We handle that in our catalog cleanup service: a person reviews every output and you approve before anything is loaded. If you would like to test the process on your own data, there is a free 10-product sample when the project is a fit.
