Crystal Reports 9.2 Export Unicode Text

[Former Member]

Hi,

we are using Crystal Reports 9.2 and looking for a possibility to export a report containing multi-byte-character-sets to a text file. If we are using formats like pdf, doc, xls everything works fine. The export file contains all character sets. But if you export a text file, it looks like that Crystal always encode the file in Ansi. Furthermore during the export dialog I did not find a possibility to change / distinguish the encoding. The same problem exists for CSV files.

Does anybody knows a possiblity to influence the encoding for exporting text? Or is CR9 not able to write text files in different encodings.

Many thanks & Best

Torsten

[former_member11696 · Accepted solution]

Hi Torsten,

It's not CR that is encoding in ansi it's the CSV or text program you are using to display the exported file that is showing you ansi characters as the default.

For example, open Notepad and click on file, Open... Note you have options now:

Most program default to ansi, but not all have the ability to select unicode...

CR typically supports UTF-8 and be sure to select a font that actually includes unicode characters, MS ARIAL Unicode is a good test.

Don

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Don,

thanks for your reply, but I'm not sure if your statement "It's not CR that is encoding in ansi..." is correct. If files are not in ANSI format they normally have a BOM to identify the encoding.

UTF-7	2B 2F 76 ( 38 | 39 | 2B | 2F )
UTF-8	EF BB BF
UTF-16 Big Endian	FE FF
UTF-16 Little Endian	FF FE
UTF-32 Big Endian	00 00 FE FF
UTF-32 Little Endian	FF FE 00 00

If you e.g. create such a file with notepad, you will see such bom. But a report text file created by CR9 does not contain such a BOM although the complete report contains Unicode font only. So my question is, how can I tell CR9 to write down a report in text format with unicode encoding. Is there a option in the tool? Any report settings?

Many thanks,

Torsten

[former_member11696 · Accepted solution]

Hi Torsten,

This rings a bell now... But remember your version is the first we fully converted to support UNICODE and external strings were limited to MBCS.

I suggest you do as Ludek suggested and download CR 2008/2011 trial version and see if this works for you.

No way to patch 9.2 now so only option is to upgrade.

Or if you upgrade to VS 2010 then download the installer for CR for VS and test there. It's a free download but you do need VS 2010/2012

Don

[former_member183750]

Not sure about CR 9.2. Too much water under that bridge...

I do know that there are no issues with CR 2008 and higher. You can download an eval of CR 2008 from here and see how that works out for you.

One thing to note as I am not sure of the SDK you are using. If you are using the Report Designer Component (craxdrt.dll), you might be out of luck as the RDC was retired in CR XI R2 (11.5). After CR XI R2, your only SDK options are .NET and Java. If you are using the RDC and absolutely must stay on that, contact sales at 866-681-3435 and they may be able to help out in getting CR XI R2 for you...

- Ludek

Senior Support Engineer AGS Product Support, Global Support Center Canada

Follow us on Twitter

Got Enhancement ideas? Try the SAP Idea Place

Share Your Knowledge in SCN Topic Spaces

[Former Member]

Hi Ludek,

thanks for your answer. Yes we are using a SDK / API via C++. But after we got issues with MBCS here, I just used CR9 directly without any parts of our solution between.Please find attached a screenshot (sry, for the german language). If I refresh a report / get the data, the report looks fine in CR9. As I already mentioned, the export in different formats too. But due to the fact that there is no possiblity to select an encoding during export into a text file, I assume that it's always written in ANSI encoding. If you open such a file in hex-mode, you can also see that BOM is missing.

Best Regards,

Torsten