Odd special character in field value

718
3
05-23-2017 06:51 AM
JoeBorgione
MVP Emeritus

Enterprise gdb, v10.3 with SQL 2012 back end

Has anyone ever seen a special character appear like the ones highlighted in the image?  I never have.  Just wondering what they might be....

That should just about do it....
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3 Replies
JoshuaBixby
MVP Esteemed Contributor

Likely a text encoding/decoding issue.  You have run into some "gremlins."  Are you running Windows 10 with language packs, by chance?  Why does some text display with square boxes in some apps on Windows 10?

Sorting out text encoding/decoding problems is as much an art as a science.  You could start by selecting some of the odd fields and dumping the strings as bytes to tease out the code points and what encoding may be causing the issue.

JoeBorgione
MVP Emeritus

Thanks Joshua-  I didn't make the edits, it came from a remote client, and I don't know if they are using Windows 10 or not.  I exported the offending records to a file gdb and edited the field values there, and it was okay.  I'll just adjust the enterprise version  values and move on.

bixb0012

That should just about do it....
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TedKowal
Occasional Contributor III

Joe,

I am use to receiving all sorts of external data and many gremlins embedded within...  If you are using SQL server, one technique I use is to clean up the  text data to printable ascii codes only ... using techniques like described here:  Remove non ASCII characters from column