- 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
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