We have uploaded a file with bad encoding now when downloading it again all the "strange" French characters are mixed up.
Example of the bad text:
R�union
Now when opening the CSV with Openoffice we tried all of the encodings in the Dropdown none of them seem to work.
Anyone have a way to fix the encoding to the correct one that we can view the chars?
Links to file https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwgeuQK3LAFRWkJuNHd2TlF2WjQ/view?usp=sharing
Kr.
Sadly there is no way to automatically fix the linked file. Consider the two words afectación and sécurité. In the file they have been converted incorrectly to afectaci?n and s?curit?. There is no way to convert the question marks back because sometimes they're ó and other times é.
(Actually instead of question marks the file uses the unicode replacement character, but that doesn't change the problem).
Hopefully you have an earlier version of the file that has not been converted incorrectly.
Next time try to use a consistent encoding. This question gives some suggestions for how to do this.
If the original data cannot be obtained, there is one thing that could be done outside of retyping the whole thing. It is possible to use dictionary lookups to guess the missing words. However this would be a difficult project, and there would be mistakes where incorrect guesses were made. It's probably not worth it.
Related
Here's an interesting puzzle, and I'd welcome any thoughts that anyone has. I don't think that there's a right or wrong answer here.
My program is loading a file which contains (amongst other things) string data structures. It helpfully declares what type the structure is (UTF8, UTF16 etc), and its length (of course) before the structure, so my program knows how to handle the data. Up to now this has worked perfectly every time.
Now I have been given a data file to load which has rubbish on the end of it - and, when I say rubbish, I mean that it looks like UTF8 at the end of a structure which is declared as UTF16.
D·a·v·e···E·d·m·u·n·d·s·o·n·d`upbqp!c°rÞPrpupÎÐAgâh(28.RïSÿ
The Dave Edmundson part is fine - it's everything after that which needs to be trimmed in this case. The fly in the ointment is that I still need to be able to handle legitimate UTF16 extended characters (like Korean, Chinese etc).
I could just fling my hands up in the air and say, "this data is corrupt", and spit out an error. But I'd like to be able to clean it if at all possible. Any ideas that anyone might have would be very welcome!
This is a logical issue, hence no code - if anyone is interested, I'm using Objective-C, but all I'm really after is some intelligent conversation on how I might approach this issue. I don't need code to be written for me!
Does anyone have a sample code for parsing the CEDICT file? CEDICT is a Chinese-English Dictionary. For instance, currently, if I open it in a text editor, a line in the CEDICT file looks like:
不 不 [bu4] /(negative prefix)/not/no/
I would like to see it as:
不 不 [bu4] /(negative prefix)/not/no/
I found Textwrangler to do this for me as a text editor. What I now need is sample code that achieves the same.
The thing is, it's just an encoding problem. If the line looks like
不 不 [bu4] /(negative prefix)/not/no/
It's because the text editor doesn't know/realize that the text is encoded as UTF-8. Text Wrangler, or its big brother BBEdit, are very good at guessing encoding, and can even be asked to display text in a specific encoding.
Since we don't know what you want, in the end, to achieve, it's hard to tell you exactly what has to be done, specifically. What I can say is that your app (which language are you using anyway?) needs to be Unicode aware (and be able to read/manipulate UTF strings).
I wrote a couple of apps based on the CEDICT, one for Mac OS X, one for Android. Parsing and indexing the CEDICT is not very hard.
UPDATE
Regarding the parsing itself of the CEDICT, it's nothing complicated. I don't do Objective-C, never have, never will, but the process would be the same in any language:
Read a line. Say your own example: 不 不 [bu4] /(negative prefix)/not/no/
You have four fields: Trad. Ch., Simp. Ch., Reading, Meaning(s).
These fields are space separated. Of course the 4th field may contain spaces, so be careful.
Store (I used an sqlite db) the 4 fields in to db.
You might want to remove the slashes from the definition field, replace them with something else.
Loop
You have now converted the CEDICT to a database. That's the easy part. As for tokenizing Chinese, good luck with that, mate. Better minds than mine are still banging their heads on this one.
I have a .csv list of businesses. The file has some strange characters in. For example, in this field: Stocktonon-Tees, the first hyphen, between Stockton and on seems to be a character with the value 6 rather than a hyphen, with the value 45. Stack overflow will probably sanatize this so you can't see it, so here is a pastebin:
http://pastebin.com/NuyyaQy9
Can anyone explain why this could be? Is it some encoding issue that I have missed? Or a corruption in the dataset?
Yes, it's almost certainly an encoding issue. A file just consists of binary data - it's how you interpret that binary data that matters. It sounds like Notepad is guessing at the originally-intended encoding, but whatever else you're using isn't.
Unfortunately you haven't said anything about what software is trying to read the file or what wrote it in the first place - but you should look at what encoding Notepad thinks it is, and work from there.
If it's your code that wrote the file out, and you get to decide the encoding, I'd recommend UTF-8 as a good general purpose, platform-portable encoding.
<text><![CDATA[øCu·l es tu principal reto, objetivo o problema?]]></text>
while parsing the above tag, its crashing.
how to parse the CDATA
the same line is appearing in windows like this...
<text><![CDATA[¿Cuál es tu principal reto, objetivo o problema?]]></text>
due to the special chars the parser is crashing.
why they are converted into special chars in Mac..?
how to solve this?
Well for one, the string as you post it here looks like something has gone wrong with the encoding. "ø" is not a Spanish character.
What xml parser are you using? I would guess that somewhere in that string is a character, possibly hidden, or maybe it's "ø" which makes your parser crash.
Edit (in response to the OP's comment)
I will try to guess what is happening and hope you can use my guess to resolve what is actually happening. So when you created the xml file you used some editor. This editor used a particular encoding. This means that it transferred the characters on your screen into bytes on your disk using a particular mapping from character into bytes (it encoded the characters into bytes). There are many different encodings, one common encoding is called Latin-1. So let's assume the file was encoded using Latin-1. After creating it, you transferred the file onto another machine where you opened it in a different editor. Now, how does the new editor know the encoding of the file? The answer is that it probably tried to guess the encoding. Now here is where the problem arises: it guessed wrong and interpreted the bytes using an encoding other than Latin-1.
While you have your (garbled) file open in an editor try selecting different encodings from the menu. The one that displays all your special characters correctly is likely to be the one used when the file was created.
Edit 2
But my other question remains: what xml parser are you using?
Edit 3
Ok, so now when you write "crashing", do you actually mean crashing or does it just return? Do you get an error message? If yes, what? Can you do the following:
Remove the funny characters from this line and run your code on the following:
<text><![CDATA[l es tu principal reto, objetivo o problema?]]></text>
Does it still crash?
I read in search terms from a simple text file to send to a search engine.
It works fine in English, but gives me ???? for any Japanese text.
Text with mixed English and Japanese does show the English text, so I know it's reading it.
What I'm seeing:
Input text:
Snow Leopard をインストールする場合、新しい
Turns into:
Snow Leopard ???????????????
This is in my POST field of an HTTP.
If I set JMeter to encode the data, it just puts in the percent sequence for question marks.
About the Data:
The CSV file is very simple in
structure.
There's only one field / one column,
which I name TERM, and later use as
${TERM}
I don't really need full CSV because it's only one string per line.
There's no commas or quotes.
It's UTF-8 and when I run the Unix "file" command on the file, it says UTF-8 text.
I've also verified UTF-8 in command line and graphical mode on two machines.
Interesting note:
An interesting coincidence that I noticed: if there are 15 Japanese characters then I get 15 question marks, so at some point it's being seen as full characters and not just bytes.
JMeter CSV Dataset Config:
Filename: japanese-searches.csv
File encoding: UTF-8 (also tried without)
Variable names: TERM
Delimiter: ,
Allow Quoted Data: False (I also tried True, different, but still wrong)
Recycle at EOF: True
Stop at EOF: False
Staring mode: All threads
A few things I've tried:
- Tried Allow quoted Data. It changed to other strange characters.
- Added -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
- Tried encoding the POST stage, but it just turned into a bunch of %nn for question marks
And I'm not sure how "debug" just after the each line of the CSV is read in. I think it's corrupted right away, but I'm not sure.
If it's only mangled when I reference it, then instead of ${TERM} perhaps there's some other "to bytes" function call. I'll start checking into that. I haven't done anything with the JMeter functions yet.
Edited Dec 24:
Tweaks:
Changed formatting and added bullet
points for more clarity.
Clarified that the file is UTF-8, and have verified that.
A new theory:
Is it possible that the Japanese characters are making it through, and the issue is that EVERY SINGLE place that shows them maps them to a "?" at DISPLAY TIME only. So even though I've checked in a bunch of places, they all have a display issue just in the UI?
Is there a way in JMeter to see the numeric value of a character or string? Actually, to tell JMeter to display the list of Unicode code points?
I'll look at my last log files... although I suppose even the server logs could mis-mapped the characters.
Also, perhaps when doing variable expansion inside of the text field that I POST, where I reference the ${TERM}, maybe at that point it also maps to question marks, but that the corruption happens at that later point. If that happened, AND it was mis-displayed in the UI, then it might lead to a false conclusion.
What I'd really like to do is pause JMeter after the first CSV record, just after that line is loaded, and look at it with a "data scope" or byte editor or something. Not sure if this is possible.
Found the issue, there was another place the UTF-8 had to be specified.
In the HTTP Request, to the right of the Method, you have to also set Content Encoding to UTF-8
Yes, in hindsight, this seems obvious, but there were a number of reasons I didn't think this was needed. Some of my incorrect assumptions might be helpful for others who are debugging, so here goes - I would have thought that:
1: Once text has made it into Java as Unicode, it stays as Unicode, and goes in and out by UTF-8. Obviously not in this case.
2: I sort of thought HTTP defaulted to UTF-8 unless you say otherwise, but maybe I'm just used to XML, but probably not a good practice to assume that, and maybe HTTP defaults to ISO-Latin1 or something, or even if there's a spec, maybe folks don't follow it.
3: And if I don't specific it, I'd think the "do no harm" approach would be to pass the characters on, and let the receiver on the other end deal with it. Wrong again!
(OK, so points 1, 2 and 3 overlap a bit)
4: Even though my HTTP Request POST, I did still try the Encode checkbox. I certainly thought that would have encoded it, but all I got was the repeating % hex for question marks, so seemed to me that the data was already corrupted at that point. Wrong again. I suspect WITHIN the HTTP phase, there's TWO character transitions, first from Unicode to whatever encoding it thinks you have, and THEN a second encoding into the %signs, and my data was mis-encoded at the first step.
5: And I would have thought JMeter would say something or warn, but from my reading, apparently it's not helpful in that respect. You can do logging or whatever.
And the "?" is Java's way of reporting a problem BY default, this started in the Java 1.4x timeframe. In my Java code I prefer to set encoding errors to report as an exception, but again, not the default, and not what JMeter does.
So I learned my lesson.
The HINT that the Unicode was at least starting out OK was that the number of question marks equaled the number of Japanese characters, instead of having 2 or 3 times as many question marks. If the length of "???" matches your Japanese (or Chinese) string, then Java DID see actual Unicode characters at some point along the journey. Whereas if you see 3 times as many ?'s as input text, then Java always saw them as bytes or ints or whatever, and NEVER as valid codepoints.
Came across this topic when searching for solution to use parameters from csv file that contained some columns written in Hebrew.
I used Excel 2007 to create a 1000 lines data for user registrations. The first and the last names had to be in Hebrew.
I exported the file to "Unicode text" file. It became tab delimited.
"Unicode Text" saves in UTF-16 LE (Little Endian), not in UTF-8. That is important.
I opened the result in Notepad++. I could see the Hebrew letters properly. The Notepad++ has the "Encoding" menu item, where you can check the encoding or change it. So I changed the Little Endian to UTF-8.
Then I replaced tabs with commas (just selected the tab and pasted it into the Find box.
The parameters were substituted ok, but after running the script I saw the following:
In the "View Results Tree" listener I opened the "Result" tab of the "Http Request".
The parameters were substituted, but the HTTP view tab (on the bottom) of the Request showed me some gibberish.
But when I looked at the Raw view, I saw that the request parameters actually contained strings like %D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%98%D7%94 that when taken in pairs (%D7 %A9) corersponded properly to Hebrew letters.
To my mind, the JMeter has a bug and can not properly display the unicode chars. But it sends (POSTs) them out ok.
Hope I am right and hope it will help someone.
You can try to use "SHIFT-JIS" in Content encoding (it's nearby Method selection). Then you should uncheck "Encode?" for parameter that included Japanese.
Hope it works you.