Photomonkey wrote:
Ok, Just a wild guess. CVS = Comma-separated values.
Grin! I doubt users of such packages would agree :-) But I get your intent.
In English the decimal separator is a dot '.' In many languages the decimal separator is a comma ','. I guess French uses a comma as the separator. This is probably the most likely cause of the problem. In general I think it is better that to "force" the programming logic to use a specific Culture type both when reading and writing a cvs file.
Formatting of numbers and currency amounts is only part of a culture. My problem is specifically concerned with the extra characters that get added to a supposedly plain text file, that indicate UTF-8 was used to encode the file. These are :-
a) Three bytes inserted at the very start of the file, before the first 'real' byte of data. These are 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF.
b) Certain characters located in the top-half of the character set are not available in every code page. These are preceded by an extra byte to identify the particular code point i.e. you have a 16-bit character amongst the conventional 8-bit characters.
At present, only 3 characters cause me an immediate problem: namely, Alt-0188, Alt-0189 and Alt-0190 - the three 'fractional' symbols for a quarter, a half an three-quarters.
-- Regards, Mike Fry Johannesburg.
