Hi,

I'm hoping that someone can point me in the right direction of a listing to do with German Characters. We have daily excel files that come in and often the special characters ( Ü ö ß etc) often come in converted to things like ¼ æ ¥ instead. This obviously then takes us time to attempt to find the correct address.

Is there a listing to convert these (I do understand its some kind of error but we dont have the authority to change the programming etc behind the documents) as I'm assuming that the converted symbols are representative of the original special characters.

Any help would be appriciated

Even if you cannot change the programming which has caused the error it would be good to know how the error was caused. Have you looked through it to try to identify where the issue is?

I would expect a solution to be much more readily available once the cause has been identified.

All I know is that when we receive the excel files, they are already like this, however, the person who is sending them is swearing down that they are in proper formatted german (hence why we have no real editorial rights).

From what i've read up on it could be some sort of import error or error between teh transfer of the file possibly?

I'm just not sure what type of base language they are converting too - all I do know is that the ü converts to ¼ (for instance) and that as basically the only person in the company who has any sense of german full stop, i'm left to attempt to find the original word - hence why if anyone knew of a listing of these as opposed to me searching every time!

Are you both using the same font?
Are you both using the same translator?

You say that the person sending them says they are formatted correctly but when they are received they are formatted incorrectly?

It may be worth sending one back and seeing if it still appears correct to the sender. It could be something as simple as different versions of Excel being used by the two of you rather than an error in the process itself.


There's a chance that someone else her has had the exact same issue, but if the cause can be found then people who have not encountered this issue can help too.

I'd strongly advise sending a file back to the sender to see if he/she still sees it correctly formatted. If they still say it's formatted correctly then it's likely a difference between the two environments, if not then at least you have eliminated that.

ok, I'll get them to give that a try - I don't suppose in the meantime there are any lists as to what actually means what - I have half a dozen bits here's a I need to convert or find and Germany is a really big place :eek:

@ DCrake - Same font - translator not needed as they are typed into the site directly in German.

The problem is we don't know what we are converting from.

Without knowing how the characters were transformed in the first place it's hard to build something which will reverse the process!

That's why I said that with the current level of information the only person who can help you is someone who had the exact same issue. Without knowing more the rest of us wouldn't know how to solve it. We can't reverse something unless we know what was done originally.

I've asked the question and am awaiting an answer - if i can get a example of the file with the erronous characters - would that help?

It certainly wouldn't hinder, though the results without knowing what was done is still of limited use.

It's like someone giving you the answers to a test and asking you to provide the questions which were asked to get those answers.

:edit:

The above is assuming the spreadsheet with the results has no code, etc and is basically just an export of data. If it includes code detailing part of the process then it would be much more helpful.

I'll do my best but obviously as i'm doing this for someone else it may not come back straight away!
thanks for the help so far - I've read something about UTF-8 encoding which seems to features the whole ü converts to ¼ thing so i'm trying to read up on it as well!

thanks for your help so far!

No problem.

If you haven't resolved it by the time you get a response just come back here. :)

GL with the UTF-8 lead.