Names with special characters being skewed

Kim_Covell

A student application came through with an apostrophe in the name, but on the text file sent to us by CCCApply, the apostrophe was changed to several other symbols.  This caused the name to be entered into our system with unreadable characters.

When we view the application through the Report Center, the name displays with the apostrophe.

Please advise.  We have a student example that we can provide you with.

Kimberly

severa

Normally when the data file has 'several other symbols' it means the original character was probably non-ascii. An apostrophe is usually ascii and should come across normally, but there are a number of different apostrophe characters and I'm guessing what you're seeing is one of the others. Some of the others will come across as question marks (depending on your data file output format--if its not utf-8 it may just be one question mark). If you're on windows, hold down ALT key and type 0146. This is one ive seen in our data that is treated differently. I have not tested these characters with the stripDiacritics setting. But that's the first thing i'd try if you want to maintain the character. Adjusting the output format would be the other. Note that your SIS may have pretty strict assumptions about the incoming data format, so realize it may not be trivial to modify.

Kim_Covell

     This is what the apostrophe is being sent as on the text file from CCCApply.  Thanks for the info.  We came to the same conclusion, but your information is very helpful.  We are working on a way to identify and resolve these names as they come into our SIS.

Thank you 

Matthew_Owen

We had a similar issue a few years ago. We tracked it back to a character encoding issue where transfer-client.jar wasn't writing the file as UTF-8, but instead using the system default character encoding.

Try telling Java to encode the file as UTF-8 instead of the system default:

    java -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Dlogback.configurationFile=conf/logback.xml  -jar transfer-client.jar

Kim_Covell

Thank you!