Wednesday, July 09, 2008

07. Uploading files to Itracks - character encoding

Accented characters can be an issue when using an international Itracks account.

Most of these issues can be resolved by ensuring that all files uploaded to the Itracks software - html whiteboards, user files (CSV or TXT), and discussion guides (CSV or TXT) are encoded using UTF-8 (see Wikipedia for a discussion of UTF-8. Another great discussion is here).


Indeed, in tests I conducted yesterday and today, the international (French) Itracks software only accepted CSV or TXT files created by Excel if they were first encoded as UTF-8 or UTF-16.


The one exception: curiously enough, you can upload a CSV discussion guide created by Excel directly into the Itracks software, even though it is encoded as Windows 1252 (only if it is created entirely in Excel, apparently; if any information is pasted in from another application, the file is saved with ISO-8859!) A user file, Windows 1252 encoding, cannot be uploaded.


Moral: encode to UTF-8 all uploads.

How?

One way to convert a file to UTF-8 encoding is to open it in Notepad, and then save it using the UTF-8 encoding option.

There is another way to convert text files to UTF-8 encoding. And that is by using a nifty (and free) utility called charsc.exe that you can download from the site of the author, Benjamin Kalytta.

The utility automatically detects the current encoding, and provides you with a wide selection of encoding alternatives. It will also work in batch mode, allowing you to convert a number of files at once.

2 comments:

Ros said...

Thanks for writing this.

PierreB said...

You're very welcome, my pleasure. Thanks for the comment.