importing special characters

[Toxalot]

I have a database in dBASE IV format that needs to be imported into
Access. The special characters are getting corrupted. E with acute for
example ends up appearing as a border character. It's the same
character I get if I type alt+201 into Access, but if I type alt+0201
then I get the E with acute. I've checked through several special
characters and it is as though the leading 0 has been dropped on all
of them.

The special characters are used in several fields in several tables in
the database, but I only need to do the import once.

Is there a way to import so that they stay intact?

Jennifer

 

[Toxalot]

How can I know what font the dBASE IV tables are in? I'm looking at
them in FoxPro.

 

[Paul Shapiro]

You might need to assign a code page to the dBase IV files. I'm not sure how
you'd do that. I think dBase IV was a single byte per character, so it
couldn't have used Unicode to represent special characters. I would guess
you have to use the same code page for the import as the original user was
using during data entry. See if the dBase driver has any code page options.
Or you could try temporarily assigning a different code page to the
computer.

dBase III files could be opened in a text editor and you would see the data.
It was all stored as one row per record, fixed length text file. I don't
know if dBase IV changed that, but if you're using .dbf files, I suspect
it's the same. There was one leading character at the beginning of the row
to indicate row deletion. I forget the details but maybe it was a ? or *.

If you can open the file in notepad, maybe you can make a copy of the file,
save it as a .txt file, and then import it from there with more control over
character interpretation.