Today’s Macfixit contained the following:
Entourage vCard import Mike Bombich writes in with a procedure for importing Entourage vCards (used for contact information) into Apple's Mac OS X AddressBook application.
"After turning on invisible characters in BBEdit, I learned that the reason that Entourage's vCards do not work with AddressBook is that every other character is a null character (ASCII character 0). Apparently AddressBook (and probably any other honest vCard compliant application) cannot interpret a file interspersed with null characters. After removing the characters and converting the line endings to DOS format, the file imported just fine. I then wrote a quick and dirty little AppleScript that parsed the files to remove these characters."
This sounds to me as if the issue is that Entourage is writing Unicode (UTF-16) data that the Apple address book is unable to interpret as it is expecting ASCII. Is this the right?
That’s correct. It would be better if Entourage wrote a Byte-Order-Mark (BOM) into the file, but it doesn’t...
Dan
