Why are there unknown characters in my downloaded file?

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downloaded from Banner, the data will be in the UTF-8 format unless you are given the ... such as Excel, or other applications, such as a text editor like Notepad.
Opening UTF-8 Comma-Separated Value (.CSV) Files

Why are there unknown characters in my downloaded file? Data in Banner is stored using a character format known as UTF-8 (Note: See http://unicode.org for more information about character sets, Unicode, and UTF-8, etc.). When information is downloaded from Banner, the data will be in the UTF-8 format unless you are given the option to choose a different character set. You may open the data file with a spreadsheet application, such as Excel, or other applications, such as a text editor like Notepad. If the application that is used to open the file does not recognize that the file character set is UTF-8, you may see unknown characters displayed by the application.

Example of File Download dialog box.

There is a know issue with Microsoft Excel opening comma separated values (.CSV) files incorrectly when the character set selected is UTF-8 and the file contains multi-byte characters. Unknown characters appear when opening a .CSV file that contains double-byte characters.

©2010 – Student Systems Functional Competency Center Opening and Saving .CSV Reports with UTF-8

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Can I open my file so that it is readable? Yes. Open the file in an application that supports UTF-8 encoding, such as Notepad. To open the file in Microsoft Excel, use the following workaround technique: After your download is completed, change the file extension to from .csv to .txt. Ignore any prompted warning message. Open Microsoft Excel. Open the .txt document. The Text Import Wizard will open. Select Delimited as the original data type and Unicode (UTF-8) for the file origin. Click Next.

Set the Delimiter as Comma. Click Finish.

The result will be a file that displays the data correctly. To avoid having to repeat these steps every time you open the file, save it in a format that is UTF-8 aware, e.g. as an Excel Workbook.

©2010 – Student Systems Functional Competency Center Internationalization of Banner 8

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