Did you run a successful import and end up with this funny character?
The replacement character (often displayed as a black rhombus with a white question mark) is a symbol found in the Unicode standard. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol. In other words, the program doesn't know how to print it to the screen. A common character that falls into this category is a leading or trailing space.
The following methods will help you preserve characters that are necessary and eliminate characters that are not.
We have found that using *Notepad++ is very useful for this task, you can use any text editor that has sufficient tools.
In this case the imported data was only showing the funny symbol in one column. Here are the steps to check for and eliminate the unknown characters.
Open the data source file in Microsoft® Excel®
In the text editor open an empty file with encoding set to UTF-8 (which is generally the default) and configure as follows: View-->Show Symbol--> Show All Characters
From the Excel® data source file, copy the offending cell.
In the text editor change encoding from UTF-8 to ANSI and the blank space now shows like this with the 'special character' visible.
If you find that there are just a few of these characters, the field contents can be edited and saved in a MET/TEAM record.
If however, you would like to fix the data source file you are using in your import, read on.
To prevent importing of such characters, there are two processes used, both should result in special characters being preserved correctly or in invalid ones being removed.
- The first option is simply to save the desired Excel sheet by selecting Save As "Unicode Text (.txt)" then use that Unicode text file as your data source file.
- The second option takes the first a bit farther and involves using *Notepad++
First you save the desired Excel tab by selecting Save As and select "Text (Tab delimited) (.txt)". Once the text file is saved, open it in Notepad++ and click the Encoding menu item.
If necessary, convert it to "UTF-8-BOM" and save. Use this text file for importing into MET/TEAM.
*Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GNU General Public License.
if you have additional questions on importing or any other MET/TEAM function, please contact us at softwaresupport@flukecal.com