topic Re: Odd special character in field value in Data Management Questions

Odd special character in field value

JoeBorgione — Tue, 23 May 2017 13:51:13 GMT

Enterprise gdb, v10.3 with SQL 2012 back end
Has anyone ever seen a special character appear like the ones highlighted in the image? I never have. Just wondering what they might be....

Re: Odd special character in field value

JoshuaBixby — Tue, 23 May 2017 14:31:45 GMT

Likely a text encoding/decoding issue. You have run into some "gremlins." Are you running Windows 10 with language packs, by chance? Why does some text display with square boxes in some apps on Windows 10?

Sorting out text encoding/decoding problems is as much an art as a science. You could start by selecting some of the odd fields and dumping the strings as bytes to tease out the code points and what encoding may be causing the issue.

Re: Odd special character in field value

JoeBorgione — Tue, 23 May 2017 14:54:41 GMT

Thanks Joshua- I didn't make the edits, it came from a remote client, and I don't know if they are using Windows 10 or not. I exported the offending records to a file gdb and edited the field values there, and it was okay. I'll just adjust the enterprise version values and move on.

bixb0012‌

Re: Odd special character in field value

TedKowal — Tue, 23 May 2017 14:59:40 GMT

Joe,

I am use to receiving all sorts of external data and many gremlins embedded within... If you are using SQL server, one technique I use is to clean up the text data to printable ascii codes only ... using techniques like described here: Remove non ASCII characters from column