----- Original Message ----- From: "Juan Alvarado" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2004 8:56 AM Subject: Windows specific characters
> Hello: > > I have some data in a spreadsheet that I need to load into a database. The data in the excel spreadsheet apparently contains windows specific characters. Whenever I import the data into my database, those special characters remain and since my database runs on an unix platform, I am getting all kinds of UTF-8 encoding problems in a separate application that is powered by this data. > > The tool that I am using to import the data is called Navicat. The folks there say that any data that contains double byte characters will be imported as such. So my question is if anybody knows of a tool that will get rid of those "double byte characters" or windows specific characters and replace them with standard ones. > I think you are confusing the situation by referring to double-byte characters as "Windows specific characters". Double-byte characters have nothing to do with Windows; they've been in existence for a long time on many platforms. For example, I know that they have been supported by DB2 on MVS (IBM mainframe OS) for at least 10 years. I'm not sure who first conceived of them: I suspect it was IBM but I'm really not sure. Double-byte character sets (DBCS) are used to represent characters that can't be represented in the standard single-byte Latin character sets, such as Japanese Kanji characters. I don't see how you're going to convert those to single-byte characters with *any* tool. You need to analyze this data and figure out what it is and whether you want to keep it. Then, if you do want to keep it, I think you'll need to either translate it into a language that can be represented with single-byte character sets or continue to store it in DBCS or convert it to Unicode. Rhino -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
