Old Foxpro to Access, weird characters

[aaronb50]

Hi all,

I am working on updating a 15 year old Foxpro 2.6 Database. I know nothing about Foxpro but I have a bit of Access experience.

The first thing I did was, with a new Access DB, link to the back end of the Foxpro DB. This actually worked out just fine.

The problem I'm having is that some of the fields contain really weird characters.









" (Incase the string to the left does not show up once i submite this, its 8 squars followd by one ".)

They look like this when I copy and paste here but in the fields the squares are little gray boxes with question marks in them.


Does anyone know what this is? And if so, how do I change it so I can read it.

What I currently know about them:

I was told the data was put in that way to save space.
The data is being used track assemblies and sub assemblies.
If I link to the table on a windows Machine that does not have Foxpro installed, the fields come over but the data fields are empty where as all the data for the rest of the DB comes over just fine. And when I link to the table on a windows XP machine all the data transfers just fine.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

have you linked as a "FoxPro" table - you should see it as a little fox symbol in the database window.

 

[aaronb50]

Well that answers that question. lol

I was not sure why that symbol was there.

Yes its liked as a FoxPro Table.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

strange then

I can only think the characters may be non-printing type characters, but that's strange if you linked with no problems.

are the fields with problems critical to what you are doing? What data type are they?

or as a test, try importing the table, rather than linking, and see what you get.

 

[aaronb50]

Yes thank you they are none printable characters. And it seems as though I can compare the strings of none printable characters and Change then to something that makes sense.

My issue now is I need to completely understand what that old DB was doing and how it was doing it.

I can get to the back end with no problem.

Does anyone know how to get into the design side of the front end of a FoxPro 2.6 program?

 

[kevlray]

Back in the day, I used Paradox, it seemed to handle FoxPro okay. But it has been years since I had to do it.