Extra letters between words when importing .txt files

zaxman

Forums

Good Morning/Afternoon,
I have encountered some instances of extra spaces occuring between letters in words when attempting to import .txt files utilizing the Print Report and Adobe PDF Import Assistant.
For example, when you open the .txt file (not in IDEA), you will see a field "ABCDE".  However, when attempting to import the file, the data is displayed in IDEA as "A B C D E".  Is there any way to prep the .txt field prior to import to prevent this (and not have to use @strip or other function once data is imported)?  For reference, the .txt files are exports from iSeries.
Thank you.

Brian Element Tue, 03/31/2020 - 14:47

Hi Zaxman,

It could be that the coding is something that IDEA is not expecting.  Can you load your file into Notepad ++ (if you have access to it), go to the encoding menu and let me know what encoding the file is using or load it into Notepad and then save the file, at the bottom of the Save As dialog there is an place for encoding, can you let me know what that might be.  

If it is different from UTF-8 or ANSI try saving it as one of these formats and see if that might fix the problem.

 

zaxman Tue, 03/31/2020 - 16:57

Brian,
Thank you so much! For one of the files, I followed your suggestion.  It was originally Unicode coding.  I saved it to UTF-8 and that file comes in clean now.  I'll also try that and/or ANSI on other files.
Thank you again....can now remove those @strip columns that I really didn't like using.

Brian Element Tue, 03/31/2020 - 18:17

Hi zaxman,

Glad to help, thanks for getting back to me and letting me know that it worked.