Anki import from CSV is not working

Question

I'm trying to import cards into my Anki deck from a CSV text file. I've tried importing it as a CSV, TSV, and TXT file, and each time I've had the same message, "Unknown file format". The text file is saved as Unicode, because it has Chinese characters. I've done this before many times and not had an issue, but for some reason now Anki won't let me import.

This is the text file:

And this is the fields. There are two fields which aren't included in the text file, but this hasn't been an issue before.

This question describes a similar issue, but never received an answer and was posted 2 years ago. Please bear this in mind before voting to close as a duplicate.

Answer 1

I encountered this problem today while importing a text file, and found that I was able to fix it by saving the file with UTF-8 encoding (it had previously been in UTF-16 LE, I think).

Check the encoding of your input file - VSCode displays the encoding of an open text file in the lower right corner of its window. Clicking on the encoding will bring up an option to save the file with a different (hopefully Anki-compatible) encoding.