Importing values with line breaks — e.g. Comments/Notes fields — using a standard Marketo CSV import
It’s not made explicit in the docs, but a Marketo CSV import does indeed support values with embedded line breaks as long as you use RFC 4180-style syntax.
If you don’t know, RFC 4180 is the closest we’ve got to an official standard for what a CSV, well, is. The RFC is Informational, so it’s not binding like a true Standard. But it covers a bunch of advanced cases very well, and if you’re writing a thing you call a “CSV parser,” you try to hit as many of its points as possible.
Anyway, in §3.6, the RFC is quite clear about how you put a line break (a.k.a. CRLF, ASCII 13 + ASCII 10, etc.) inside a value without accidentally creating a new line. You just quote the value!
So a live CSV would simply look like this:
Email,Comments
sandy+testmultiline@email.test,"This
Is
Multiline
Data"
sandy+testsingleline@email.test,"This is a single line of data"
In a CSV, quoting a value is the only way for it to contain a literal quotation mark (") or a literal comma (,), b
