I have a pipe delimited text file that I'm reading into webFOCUS. Its a fixed format file so I've created a master file to split out the fields, and all was going great until I came to a free text field, where the users appear to have used every special character known to man.

WebFOCUS is returning gibberish around or instead of those characters. Is there something I can do to enable WebFOCUS to read these characters properly.

Some examples of what's happening:

on the left of the equals is what's in the file on the right is what webfocus returns.
' = ’

" = ‥

¼ = ¼

½ = ½

– = –

£ = £

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

The problem may not be in the "reading", but in the "writing." My guess is that those characters are either not in the font set being used for displaying the output (so they are translated incorrectly to a "best guess" character) or they are not available for the language(s) being supported. I've also seen differences when output to PDF vs. HTML.

You don't mention your platform in your profile so it may be a character translation issue as well (e.g. EBCDIC to ASCII).

Try a different font or character set to see if that makes any difference.

Could also be unicode chars