[Peter Jamieson]

Going via RTF is certainly one way around this problem.

Also
the text file has to have a font that will display the charactes

Something to bear in mind is that "plain text files" do not really have
"a font". e.g. if you create some text in Word and use a particular font
because that allows you to see a particular character, but when you save
as plain text, no information about the font will be stored in the file.
Word /might/ pick an encoding that has a chance of encoding all the
characters that you used, but all you will end up with is a text file
that has the character encoding that you specified or Word selected. It
is possible that in some circumstances Progress decides to use a UTF-8
encoding. I have no way of knowing. However, since the macro I provided
reads the file byte-by-byte, you can adapt it to discover how exactly TM
is encoded in your text file.

Also, there is nothing in that file that declares that the file uses
this encoding or that encoding. So when a piece of software reads the
file, it typically has to deduce the encoding purely from the content
(and may perhaps use some settings - in Windows they would be in the
registry - to guide it). In other words, the software has to guess. In
many cases it may be impossible to decide between one encoding and another.

IMO it is unfortunate that "plain text files" do not contain information
about their encoding as standard. If the same text was included as a
part in a MIME-format email, for example the encoding would almost
certainly be provided in the part header.

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk

On 31/10/2009 07:33, cocciastella wrote:
Peter,

In discussions today we were thinking about using utf-8. Thank you for the
code so we can check it out, it's very helpful!!

The DB is Progress 8.3 and the code page is ico8859-1 which does not have
the TM, but in the UI the user can type Alt-0153 and it puts in a thick bar.
When I pull the data and write it to a text file the symbols are there. Also
the text file has to have a font that will display the charactes. I am using
Tahoma. There was a solution I found to save the text as an rtf and then
insert that into a word doc. Use the word doc as the datasourse. I cut out
the word doc and merge with the rtf file. I finally got that to work today
so I feel hopeful. I am not to great with the automation object in Progress.
On the SaveAs I can name the encoding and am using msoEncodingWestern and
word 2007 seems to like it.

Lonnie

"Peter Jamieson" wrote:

This could happen if Progress encodes the text file containing the TM
character using the Unicode UTF-8 encoding, but does not put a "Byte
Order Mark" (BOM) at the beginning of the file. (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte-order_mark for further information on BOM)

In a UTF-8 file, the BOM consists of 3 octets ("bytes") with codes
239
187
191

You could use the following macro to see what is in the first three
bytes in /your/ file:

Sub show3octets()
' (no error checking yet)
Dim c1 As String * 1
Dim c2 As String * 1
Dim c3 As String * 1
' Put the pathname of your data source file here
Const strInputPath As String = "c:\myfiles\myinput.txt"

Open strInputPath For Binary As 1
Get 1, , c1
Get 1, , c2
Get 1, , c3
MsgBox "The first three characters are "& _
CStr(Asc(c1))& ", "& _
CStr(Asc(c2))& " and "& _
CStr(Asc(c3))& "."
Close 1

End Sub

If there is no BOM, you could convert your file to a new file with a BOM
using the following code. However, you should only do this if the file
is definitely encoded as UTF-8 (sorry, I don't have code to check that
here!)

Sub insertBOM()
' (no error checking yet)
Dim c As String * 1
Dim c1 As String * 1
Dim c2 As String * 1
Dim c3 As String * 1
' Put the pathname of your input data file here
Const strInputPath As String = "c:\myfiles\myinput.txt"
' Put the pathname of your output data file here
Const strOutputPath As String = "c:\myfiles\myoutput.txt"

' Let's at least check that there is no BOM
Open strInputPath For Binary As 1
Get 1, , c1
Get 1, , c2
Get 1, , c3
If Asc(c1) = 239 And Asc(c2) = 187 And Asc(c3) = 191 Then
MsgBox "Already contains a Byte Order Mark?"
Else
Open strOutputPath For Binary As 2
c = Chr(239)
Put 2, , c
c = Chr(187)
Put 2, , c
c = Chr(191)
Put 2, , c
Put 2, , c1
Put 2, , c2
Put 2, , c3
Get 1, , c
While Not EOF(1)
Put 2, , c
Get 1, , c
Wend
Close 2
End If
Close 1

End Sub

It is possible that Progress is using some other encoding such as a
16-bit Unicode encoding, but judging from your experience so far it is
likely to be UTF-8.

That's about the best I can do without actually inspecting your data
source file.

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk

On 30/10/2009 05:08, cocciastella wrote:
How do I get symbols to display in mail merge.
The symbols are the copyright, registered tradmark and tradmark. They are
not in a specific place but could be anywhere. I have tried saving the txt
datasource to rtf format and then inserting into word doc so the datasource
is a word doc but the symbol is corrupted from the text to to the rtf. In the
text datasource it looks like:

"Report1","Subject1", ...
"xxReport","Itemxxx® description",... Which is correct.

I can't understand why word does not recognize these symbols. I get a
backwards
squiggly E. instead. I set the language to be English. Do I need to change
the code page? How is that be done?

Thank you

Thanks!




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