topic Re: Entering non-printable characters into a field in Data Management Questions

Entering non-printable characters into a field

EdwardBlair — Fri, 30 May 2014 15:25:12 GMT

Hello -

I've been dealing with a few cases where a non-printable ASCII character, such as "ENQ" (ASCII 005), have gotten into my data from a load from another source. These can cause problems with interfaces so we're trying to eliminate them from the current data.

My question is this. We don't want such characters to be added by users editing the data going forward. I know that the "ENQ" character can be added in Notepad++ by typing ctrl+E, and that typing ctrl+E in a field in the ArcMap Attribute Editor results in no character added -- which is good. I just cannot find definitive documentation that non-printable characters cannot be added by a user into a field using ArcMap. Is this the case?

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

Ed

Re: Entering non-printable characters into a field

Zeke — Fri, 30 May 2014 15:48:39 GMT

I would say no, that is not the case based on the following test I just did. Added a text field to a feature class, and ran Asc(005) in Field Calculator. Result was 53. Ran Chr(005) and result was the pipe symbol, |. Entering Chr(007) gives a dot. Etc.

Re: Entering non-printable characters into a field

EdwardBlair — Fri, 30 May 2014 16:58:01 GMT

Greg -

Thanks much. I should have did this test myself but didn't think of it. Glad you did!

Ed