writing text with special characters to file leads to strange symbols

[jurgen_meulenbeek]

Hello,

We have an issue with writing special diacritic characters like 'ë' to a file on disk.

The special characters are converted to different format in the file: for instance an 'ë' in SAP becomes 'ë' in the file.

We use the following stametent to create the file:

"Open dataset P_FILE for output in textmode encoding default"

Instead of default we also tried the encoding UTF-8 parameter, but got the same result. Our system is an ERP 6.0 NW2004S system with oracle 10 installed in UNICODE UTF-8.

I also notice that browsing the file in SAP for instance in AL11 shows the right characters. When opening the file outside SAP (in our case AIX) the strange characters are shown. We transfer the files with XCOM, so this is a big problem.

Regards,

Jurgen Meulenbeek

ING

[Former Member]

Hi Jurgen,

everything is ok. You get the ASCII representation of your character. In an ASCII editor the UTF-8 character 'ë' is displayed as 'ë'. You have to use an Unicode editor to view the correct character. If you copy the file to Windows and open it with Word or even Notepad (if your OS is new enough), then you should get the correct output. I don't know which editor on AIX supports UTF-8, but there is probably also an editor there for Unicode.

Regards

Ralph

[jurgen_meulenbeek]

Hello,

Many thanks for your answer! You state that editing with a unicode editor should solve the issue, like word. We open the file with excel and we still get the strange characters. Isn't this strange?

regards,

Jurgen

[Former Member]

Hi Jurgen,

yes this is strange. What release of Office had been used? Newer releases store and read Unicode files. May be you have to tell Excel that it should read the file as UTF-8 because Microsoft uses UCS-2 encoding by default afaik. You may try Textpad or Notepad on Vista for example.

Regards

Ralph

[jurgen_meulenbeek]

This is an excel issue obviously. opening it in word or notepad indeed does the trick. Thanks for your your help! We will look into the client opening the file.

many thanks,

Jurgen