[ODK Community] Characters not appearing in CSV file

Hi Richard,

··· On Mon, 13 Aug 2012, luning.richard@gmail.com wrote:

I'm not entirely sure if this is entirely ODK related, but since this
seems to be a fairly helpful community, I thought I'd give it a shot.

When answering questions in another language in Collect, in let's say,
Korean, the characters appear fine in the tablet and even generate fine
in Aggregate. I run into an issue when exporting the CSV aggregate file
and then trying to open it with Excel. The cells with questions
answered in Korean characters are shown with "???" instead.

After investigating the issue for a bit, I'm fairly certain that the
solution is buried somewhere in Excel. However, since so many of you
work with different languages, I thought I'd ask whether anyone has a
simple solution or has run into similar problems? Thanks in advance for
all your help. Richard

CSV is probably not the best format for this. UTF-8 is the best
representation for such characters in text files, but Microsoft hates
UTF-8 for reasons best known to them. They probably either have some weird
UTF-16-CSV that they support instead (which of course isn't really a text
file at all), or they expect the characters to be in system encoding.

You might be able to change the latter with a drop-down box during import.
If not, we might need to add native Excel export alongside CSV export to
cope with Microsoft's brokenness, and that takes programming.

What do Korean characters look like in CSV exported from Excel?

Cheers, Chris.

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