[Download-List] Special characters (accent marks, etc.)

[Jeffery Summers]

My boss is having fits with an extract that should contain special
characters for names like José, etc.  It contains special characters, but
not what he’s expecting.  From my perspective, everything’s fine.  J

 

The only thing different with this DOWNLOAD from my usual ones is I use the
pipe symbol for the delimiter and use no quotation marks.

 

After DOWNLOADing, I go to the AIX prompt and cat the file and the records
appear fine.   In this case, José has the nice accented e (é).

 

I ftp the data to my Win XP machine and open the file in Notepad, WordPad,
or Crimson Editor, (even pulled it up fine in Excel) it continues to display
properly as José. 

 

At a DOS prompt, though, when I do “type” it shows me JosΘ. (An “O”
with a dash in the middle in case it doesn’t display properly in this
e-mail.).  

 

So, all my text editors recognize the ASCII and display it properly and the
command line doesn’t.  Apparently he’s getting the “O” with a dash in
the middle and the webapp he’s using the data file with is having issues
importing the information.

 

When I provided him the data during testing, I would send it to him via
uuencode and the mail command.  Now it is set up in cron to drop the file
into a common ftp spot.  It seems uuencode fixed the characters properly,
but I don’t want to send it as an attachment.

 

I’ve played with iconv and dd without luck thus far, but I’m just familiar
enough with them to be dangerous.  Is there a setting in DOWNLOAD to ensure
an ASCII format that “plays nice” on a Win-XP platform?  Or do I need to
do something else (like the uuencode, dd, or iconv commands)?  

 

Suggestions welcome, thanks!

 

Jeff Summers

Administrative Computing

Transylvania University

300 N. Broadway

Lexington, KY 40508

jsummers at transy.edu

 

 

 

 

 



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