Exporting Contacts to CSV has junk on first line?

[Mark Beiley]

In Windows Mail under Vista, if I export contacts to a CSV file, the first
line
has 3 junk characters at the beginning. Everything else in the file looks
normal.
These 3 characters are the very first 3 characters. The line looks like
this:

Name,E-mail Address,Home Street,Home City...

Any ideas on what these 3 characters are? Is this a bug in the export?

Thanks,
Mark

 

[DGuess]

In Windows Mail under Vista, if I export contacts to a CSV file, the first
line
has 3 junk characters at the beginning. Everything else in the file looks
normal.
These 3 characters are the very first 3 characters. The line looks like
this:

Name,E-mail Address,Home Street,Home City...

Any ideas on what these 3 characters are? Is this a bug in the export?

Possible encoding error. Language settings maybe? Check in that area.

Not seeing it here.

 

[Mark Beiley]

Hi DGuess,

Thanks for the help. My language settings seem okay in Control Panel /
Regional. It is just plain English (US). I thought maybe one of my
contacts was corrupted, so I moved them all out of the Contacts folder, and
created a brand new one. Again I got 3 weird characters to start the CSV
file. They are always the same 3 characters as shown below. I'm rather
stumped...

Thanks,
Mark

 

[DGuess]

Just sounds like it might be picking up something from one of the contacts
but then, it's at the fields names.

Post this question in the regular Windows Vista newsgroups as I think it's
more the system than the files. Someone may have encountered this before. It
reminds me of the old yb that was in the emails for Outlook Express and that
was from an encoding issue which was easily solved.

Like you, I'm stumped but it just makes me wonder if it might be something
in the system itself. Explorer is basically where this is originating.

 

[Guest]

Are you using a Unicode application (and in your case specifically UTF-8) to
read the CSV? Even if you are windows has to guess if a file is Unicode or
ansi and sometimes guesses wrong. Throwing those three characters into
notepad and saving as ANSI then reopening the file and looking File - Save
As will show it is UTF-8 (easier than searching for the standard to read
it).

 

[Mark Beiley]

I think this is somehow the problem... I was reading it with Excel and also
with
an ANSI text editor (www.boxersoftware.com). Both of these showed those 3
junk characters
at the beginning. If I open the CSV file with Notepad, when I click on the
file in the "Open"
dialog, it changes the encoding automatically to "UTF-8". If I open it with
the UTF-8 encoding, the
file looks normal. If I open it with "ANSI" encoding, I see those 3 junk
characters. I guess
Windows Mail is exporting the CSV file with UTF-8 encoding. I'm not sure
what that is, but
at least now I understand (sort of...).

Thanks,
Mark

 

[Guest]

ANSI has 256 characters, not enough for all languages in the world. Unicode
has lots more (there are different versions). In English UTF-8 and ANSI are
the same. Other characters not commonly used in english are two characters
in UTF-8 (all characters are two in other unicode types ie 16 bit rather
than 8 bit - there is also a 32 bit unicode). So an english UTF-8 file is
likely identical to an ANSI file except all unicode files start with a
header saying what flavour of unicode it is.

I only have Excel 95 installed. On the wizard for opening text files (same
page as choosing fixed width fields or delimited) I get to choose various
formats (though this is too old for unicode to be a choice).

Also different divisions of MS use different unicode formats just to make
sure it can't work seemlessly.

 

[Mark Beiley]

I learned what those 3 "junk" characters are. They are the "Byte Order
Mask", as you've mentioned. I found a good article that explained this in
more detail:

http://codesnipers.com/?q=node/68


Thanks,
Mark