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lhsi writes:

Poor encoding by Microsoft blamed for problems in a UK initiative to improve data transparency.

When you export from popular spreadsheet applications you don't get control over encoding and it usually chooses a bad one," she said. "It usually won't be UTF-8. It will usually be something like Windows 1252."

Windows 1252 was an old, proprietary Microsoft encoding. The result, said Tennison, was the data contained characters incomprehensible to other people and programs. Their systems - unless they were using Microsoft Excel on a Microsoft Windows computer - interpreted the incomprehensible characters as "garbage".

"It can cause problems matching stuff up," she said. "If you have the name correct in some data and not in other data then you can't match those two names together. And therefore you can't put the data together accurately."

Does anyone have any interesting character encoding stories?

1. "lhsi" - https://soylentnews.org/~lhsi/
2. "Poor encoding by Microsoft blamed for problems in a UK initiative to improve data transparency." - http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2014/09/microsoft-gets-flack-over-rubb-8.html

printed from SoylentNews, Microsoft Gets Flack over "Rubbish" UK Data on 2024-04-16 05:17:55