I have some sensitive information that I need to import into SQL Server that is proving to be a challenge. I'm not sure what the original database that housed this information was, but I do know it is provided to us in a Unix fixed length text file with LF row terminator. I have two files: a small file that covers a month's worth of data, and a much larger file that covers 5 years worth of data. I have created a BCP format file and command that successfully imports and maps the data to my SQL Server table.
The 5 year data is supposedly in the same format, so I've used the same command and format file on the text file. It starts processing some records, but somewhere in the processing (after several thousand records), it throws Unexpected EOF encountered and I can see in the database some of the rows are mapped correctly according to the fixed lengths, but then something goes horribly wrong and screws up by inserting parts of data in columns they most definitely do not belong in. Is there a character that would cause BCP to mess up and terminate early?
BCP Command: BCP DBTemp.dbo.svc_data_temp in C:\Test\data2.txt -f C:\test\txt2.fmt -T -r "0x0A" -S "stageag,90000" -e log.rtf
Again, format file and command work perfectly for the the smaller data set, but something in the 5 year dataset is screwing up BCP.
Thanks in advance for the replies!
So I found the offending characters in my fixed width file. Somehow whoever pulled the data originally (I don't have access to the source), escaped (or did not escape correctly) the double quotes in some of the text, resulting in some injection of extra spaces breaking the fixed width guidelines we were supposed to be following. After correcting the double quotes by hex editing the file, BCP was able to process all records using the format file without issue. I had used the -F and -L flags to examine certain rows of the data and to narrow it down to where I could visually compare the rows that were ok and the rows where the problems started to arise, which led me to discover the double quotes issue. Hope his helps for somebody else if they have an issue similar to this!
I am trying to execute a query, after reading the content from a SQL Script file, assigning it to a variable and then executing the content. Then I get this error saying Could not find stored procedure 'ÿþ'. Please help me understand the issue. Thank you.
Info:
SQL Server 2014
SSMS Version - 12.0.4100.1
ÿþ is one way to interpret the two bytes of the the UTF-16 byte order mark, which is \xFF and \xFE.
You get those two letters when you read a file that has been saved in the UTF-16 encoding with a tool that is unaware of—or, more likely, was not configured to use—Unicode.
For example, when you edit a text file with Windows Notepad and select "Unicode" as file encoding when you save it, Notepad will use UTF-16 to save the file and will mark it with the said two bytes at the start.
If whatever thing you use to read the file is unaware of the fact that the file is Unicode, then it will use the default byte encoding of your computer to decode that text file.
Now, if that default encoding happens to be Windows-1252, like in your case, then ÿþ is what you get, because there \xFF is ÿ and \xFE is þ.
Consequently, when presented with ÿþ, SQL Server thinks it must be the name of a stored procedure, because stored procedures are the only statements that you can run by mentioning just their name. And it dutifully reports that it can't find a procedure of that name.
I have data stored in .ddm, .pnt, .fdt and .bin files.
How can I export (or extract or transform) data from those file formats into .csv?
I think it's an ADABAS database.
Yes. The file extensions looks like an adabas database.
You need an adabas/natural enviroment for running database and you can write a simple program in Natural for read database content and put them to text "work file" with delimiters ";" and csv extensions. J don't met any tool for manual unpack database files.
As peterozgood pointed out, you would normally use Natural for that.
If you're using Natural on Windows or Unix you can code the following
DEFINE WORK FILE nn TYPE 'CSV'
...where nn is a number between 1 & 32, identifying the desired workfile.
(this may also be specified by your Admin in the so-called Natparm, along with Codepage & Delimiter)
Then you can output data to the file by coding
WRITE WORK FILE nn operand1 ... operandN
Natural will automatically create the csv.
Fields will be separated by the delimiter and quoted and escaped as necessary.
(the delimiter may be specified in the Natparm or as a startup parameter)
Unfortunately this functionality is not available with Mainframe Natural.
(CSV that is. Workfiles are of course available)
I am aware that .dbf database holds (text) fields larger than 254 characters in separate .dbt files linking them with an M memo field.
I have a legacy database which I can plainly see contains a field with a stated (max) length of 255 characters.
When I edit that file and save it with OpenOffice Calc, it creates a .dbf and a .dbt. I would like to leave the edited file in the format I have found, that is with a 255 characters field.
Is that possible?
Does it depend on the character set (the only option I can see when using OpenOffice and Excel, versions that supported .dbf)?
There are many versions of dbf files; some of them, such as Clipper, actually allowed for character fields longer than 254 to be stored in the dbf file itself.
I don't believe OpenOffice nor Excel support writing to those formats, so if you want to make changes (and not just read the data) you will need to find another tool.
So far as telling the xBase version, you could start with Data File Header Structure for the
dBASE Version 7 Table File.
As for DBF file editors, Google is your friend. A quick search gave me, for example, GTK DBF Editor and CDBF. The latter I remember using about three years back with a client who was still running Clipper 5.2 apps under Microsoft Windows 98.
I'm not certain when this first occured.
I have a new drop-shipping affiliate website, and receive an exported copy of the product catalog from the wholesaler. I format and import this into Prestashop 1.4.4.
The front end of the website contains combinations of strange characters inside product text: Ã, Ã, ¢, â‚ etc. They appear in place of common characters like , - : etc.
These characters are present in about 40% of the database tables, not just product specific tables like ps_product_lang.
Another website thread says this same problem occurs when the database connection string uses an incorrect character encoding type.
In /config/setting.inc, there is no character encoding string mentioned, just the MySQL Engine, which is set to InnoDB, which matches what I see in PHPMyAdmin.
I exported ps_product_lang, replaced all instances of these characters with correct characters, saved the CSV file in UTF-8 format, and reimported them using PHPMyAdmin, specifying UTF-8 as the language.
However, after doing a new search in PHPMyAdmin, I now have about 10 times as many instances of these bad characters in ps_product_lang than I started with.
If the problem is as simple as specifying the correct language attribute in the database connection string, where/how do I set this, and what to?
Incidently, I tried running this command in PHPMyAdmin mentioned in this thread, but the problem remains:
SET NAMES utf8
UPDATE: PHPMyAdmin says:
MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)
This is the same character set I used in the last import file, which caused more character corruptions. UTF-8 was specified as the charset of the import file during the import process.
UPDATE2
Here is a sample:
people are truly living untetheredâ€ïâ€Â
Ã‚ï† buying and renting movies online, downloading software, and
sharing and storing files on the web.
UPDATE3
I ran an SQL command in PHPMyAdmin to display the character sets:
character_set_client utf8
character_set_connection utf8
character_set_database latin1
character_set_filesystem binary
character_set_results utf8
character_set_server latin1
character_set_system utf8
So, perhaps my database needs to be converted (or deleted and recreated) to UTF-8. Could this pose a problem if the MySQL server is latin1?
Can MySQL handle the translation of serving content as UTF8 but storing it as latin1? I don't think it can, as UTF8 is a superset of latin1. My web hosting support has not replied in 48 hours. Might be too hard for them.
If the charset of the tables is the same as it's content try to use mysql_set_charset('UTF8', $link_identifier). Note that MySQL uses UTF8 to specify the UTF-8 encoding instead of UTF-8 which is more common.
Check my other answer on a similar question too.
This is surely an encoding problem. You have a different encoding in your database and in your website and this fact is the cause of the problem. Also if you ran that command you have to change the records that are already in your tables to convert those character in UTF-8.
Update: Based on your last comment, the core of the problem is that you have a database and a data source (the CSV file) which use different encoding. Hence you can convert your database in UTF-8 or, at least, when you get the data that are in the CSV, you have to convert them from UTF-8 to latin1.
You can do the convertion following this articles:
Convert latin1 to UTF8
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/convert-latin1-to-utf-8
This appears to be a UTF-8 encoding issue that may have been caused by a double-UTF8-encoding of the database file contents.
This situation could happen due to factors such as the character set that was or was not selected (for instance when a database backup file was created) and the file format and encoding database file was saved with.
I have seen these strange UTF-8 characters in the following scenario (the description may not be entirely accurate as I no longer have access to the database in question):
As I recall, there the database and tables had a "uft8_general_ci" collation.
Backup is made of the database.
Backup file is opened on Windows in UNIX file format and with ANSI encoding.
Database is restored on a new MySQL server by copy-pasting the contents from the database backup file into phpMyAdmin.
Looking into the file contents:
Opening the SQL backup file in a text editor shows that the SQL backup file has strange characters such as "sÃ¥". On a side note, you may get different results if opening the same file in another editor. I use TextPad here but opening the same file in SublimeText said "så" because SublimeText correctly UTF8-encoded the file -- still, this is a bit confusing when you start trying to fix the issue in PHP because you don't see the right data in SublimeText at first. Anyways, that can be resolved by taking note of which encoding your text editor is using when presenting the file contents.
The strange characters are double-encoded UTF-8 characters, so in my case the first "Ã" part equals "Ã" and "Â¥" = "¥" (this is my first "encoding"). THe "Ã¥" characters equals the UTF-8 character for "å" (this is my second encoding).
So, the issue is that "false" (UTF8-encoded twice) utf-8 needs to be converted back into "correct" utf-8 (only UTF8-encoded once).
Trying to fix this in PHP turns out to be a bit challenging:
utf8_decode() is not able to process the characters.
// Fails silently (as in - nothing is output)
$str = "så";
$str = utf8_decode($str);
printf("\n%s", $str);
$str = utf8_decode($str);
printf("\n%s", $str);
iconv() fails with "Notice: iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string".
echo iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", "så");
Another fine and possible solution fails silently too in this scenario
$str = "så";
echo html_entity_decode(htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), ENT_QUOTES , 'ISO-8859-15');
mb_convert_encoding() silently: #
$str = "så";
echo mb_convert_encoding($str, 'ISO-8859-15', 'UTF-8');
// (No output)
Trying to fix the encoding in MySQL by converting the MySQL database characterset and collation to UTF-8 was unsuccessfully:
ALTER DATABASE myDatabase CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE myTable CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
I see a couple of ways to resolve this issue.
The first is to make a backup with correct encoding (the encoding needs to match the actual database and table encoding). You can verify the encoding by simply opening the resulting SQL file in a text editor.
The other is to replace double-UTF8-encoded characters with single-UTF8-encoded characters. This can be done manually in a text editor. To assist in this process, you can manually pick incorrect characters from Try UTF-8 Encoding Debugging Chart (it may be a matter of replacing 5-10 errors).
Finally, a script can assist in the process:
$str = "så";
// The two arrays can also be generated by double-encoding values in the first array and single-encoding values in the second array.
$str = str_replace(["Ã","Â¥"], ["Ã","¥"], $str);
$str = utf8_decode($str);
echo $str;
// Output: "så" (correct)
I encountered today quite a similar problem : mysqldump dumped my utf-8 base encoding utf-8 diacritic characters as two latin1 characters, although the file itself is regular utf8.
For example : "é" was encoded as two characters "é". These two characters correspond to the utf8 two bytes encoding of the letter but it should be interpreted as a single character.
To solve the problem and correctly import the database on another server, I had to convert the file using the ftfy (stands for "Fixes Text For You). (https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy) python library. The library does exactly what I expect : transform bad encoded utf-8 to correctly encoded utf-8.
For example : This latin1 combination "é" is turned into an "é".
ftfy comes with a command line script but it transforms the file so it can not be imported back into mysql.
I wrote a python3 script to do the trick :
#!/usr/bin/python3
# coding: utf-8
import ftfy
# Set input_file
input_file = open('mysql.utf8.bad.dump', 'r', encoding="utf-8")
# Set output file
output_file = open ('mysql.utf8.good.dump', 'w')
# Create fixed output stream
stream = ftfy.fix_file(
input_file,
encoding=None,
fix_entities='auto',
remove_terminal_escapes=False,
fix_encoding=True,
fix_latin_ligatures=False,
fix_character_width=False,
uncurl_quotes=False,
fix_line_breaks=False,
fix_surrogates=False,
remove_control_chars=False,
remove_bom=False,
normalization='NFC'
)
# Save stream to output file
stream_iterator = iter(stream)
while stream_iterator:
try:
line = next(stream_iterator)
output_file.write(line)
except StopIteration:
break
Apply these two things.
You need to set the character set of your database to be utf8.
You need to call the mysql_set_charset('utf8') in the file where you made the connection with the database and right after the selection of database like mysql_select_db use the mysql_set_charset. That will allow you to add and retrieve data properly in whatever the language.
The error usually gets introduced while creation of CSV. Try using Linux for saving the CSV as a TextCSV. Libre Office in Ubuntu can enforce the encoding to be UTF-8, worked for me.
I wasted a lot of time trying this on Mac OS. Linux is the key. I've tested on Ubuntu.
Good Luck