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joebocop
514 post(s)
#18-Sep-17 23:02

CSV files exported by Release 8 are encoded as UTF-8.

CSV files exported by Future are encoded as UTF-8-BOM.

I have found that some applications to which I import these data are not able to handle the UTF-8-BOM encoding. Importing CSV files exported by Future into Release 8 show a strange character in the first position in the first row (see attached screenshot).

What's the advantage of the new encoding system, and is it desirable to provide encoding options in an export dialog in Future?

Thank you.

Attachments:
bom_wtf.PNG

adamw


10,447 post(s)
#21-Sep-17 09:26

Well, the advantage of putting BOM is that applications can then see what the encoding of the file is. Without BOM, applications have to guess. Sometimes they guess wrong. Depending on their defaults (which mostly depend on their age) this can happen often or rarely.

We will likely add an option to omit BOM specifically for applications that choke on it, but we will certainly not make it the default and will only suggest using it for these specific scenarios (get data out of Future -> get it into the application that has issues handling BOM -> quickly delete the file to avoid using it again with other software and making that other software guess what the encoding is instead of just reading it from BOM).

With respect to 8 in particular, it would be better to just fix it to recognize BOM. We might do this.

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