Quoted attributes

Each product in a tab-delimited product data source must appear on a single line without extra tabs or line breaks. If you just cut and paste product information directly and this content contains tabs, line breaks, or other formatting, our system won't be able to process this part of your product data source.

But if you surround this content with quotation marks (such as "product content [tab] product content [line break] product content"), our system treats everything within the quotation marks as a single attribute. Using quoted attributes can save you from having to retype or reformat existing content you'd like to use.

On this page

• Get started
• Best practices

Get started

Quoted fields are automatically enabled for all newly created product data sources. If you need to enable quoted attributes in an existing product data source:

1. In your Merchant Center account, select Settings in the left navigation menu.
2. Select Data sources.
3. Under the “Product sources” tab, select a product source for which you’d like to enable quoted attributes.
4. On the page that loads, select the Data source setup tab and click the pencil icon across the “Quoted fields” option.
5. Select Using quoted fields.
6. Select Save.

Note: Quoted attributes are not supported for Google Sheets data sources

Best practices 

If you add your products to Merchant Center using a tab-separated text file pay attention to special characters as follows:

• For repeated attributes, wrap attribute or sub-attribute values with a quote (") if these values contain a comma (,), to ensure the comma is used literally and is not interpreted as an attribute-separator. 
• For group attributes, also wrap sub-attribute values with a quote (") if these values contain a colon (:), to ensure it is used literally and is not interpreted as a sub-attribute separator. 
• Don’t wrap an entire group attribute with double quotes, only the individual sub-attribute values.
• If you use quoted values and your content already contains a quotation mark (for example, 12" Teflon Frying Pan), you must pair it with a second quotation mark so that the system doesn't confuse this quotation with an attribute boundary. For example, instead of "12" Teflon Frying Pan", enter "12"" Teflon Frying Pan".
• Unlike Google sheets that are directly ingested in Merchant Center, don’t escape special characters with a backslash (\), as the backslash would be interpreted literally, as part of the value.
• If you create a .tsv file by downloading the file from Google Sheets, use these same instructions when entering the values in the sheets and don’t use the instructions for downloading directly from the Google sheet into Merchant Center.
• Quoted fields are automatically enabled for all newly created product data sources. If you need to enable quoted attributes in an existing product data source, enable this setting in your Merchant Center account. 
• The same instructions apply to a TSV file downloaded from a Google sheet or one that is generated directly for example from a text editor or generated in code.
• Don’t use CSV files due to commas being a reserved character used to separate attribute values. If you use Text files, use the TSV (tab-separated values) format.