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Home > Forums > Programmers > DBMS Packages > Microsoft: FoxPro (old versions 1 to 2.6) Forum

Special Characters Incorrect when Opening in Word

thread182-1682602
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RancidFerret (IS/IT--Management)
8 May 12 14:19
Ok, I tried to search this forum as well as all over the web for the solution to this problem and found nothing.

I have a user at a site in another country (England) using Foxpro LAN 2.0. Sometimes the user has to enter special characters in Foxpro such as currency symbols or a dash or whatever. The problem is, when he goes to open his Word 2003 file (I assume it is linking in to some Foxpro database, I'm really not familiar with Foxpro) the special characters are changed to different special characters. (For example, dashes appear as some weird "A" symbol)

Everything used to work fine but his system got a virus and some tech took it and upgraded him from XP to Windows 7. He also thinks he used to have Office 2010 and now he has Office 2003. Since then, he is having this problem. Before I start changing software or the OS on his PC I wanted to check to see if anyone knew what the issue could be and if there is a fix for it. It seems like it could be a character encoding problem... any ideas?
danfreeman (Programmer)
8 May 12 17:05
Probably a codepage issue. Does the newly installed Foxpro application on the newly installed version of Windows have the same config.fp file as the old installation?

That said, FPD did not natively write to Word documents, so without knowing how that data gets from Foxpro to Word nobody can really help you.

It sounds like you have a lot of "new" going on in a rather uncontrolled manner. That can be mighty tough to decipher. Good luck!
RancidFerret (IS/IT--Management)
9 May 12 11:31
Yeah, that's been my luck lately. It sounds like the change took place in October of last year and they have been having the problem since then. I first heard about it and decided to get involved a couple weeks ago but we don't use Foxpro at my local site (I had never even heard of it until now lol) so I am a little bit lost at the moment.

Thanks for the info though, it gives me something to investigate. I will look into the config.fp situation. (for what it's worth, Foxpro is located on a network share. Unless the config.fp file is located somewhere in the user's profile I assume it is the same as before)
TamarGranor (Programmer)
9 May 12 16:07
Is this really FoxPro or is it Visual FoxPro (which is more recent)? If the latter you're looking for config.fpw, not config.fp.

If it's FoxPro and especially FoxPro for DOS, then I'm very suspicious of any connection to Word files.

You can look for a file with a name in the format vfpXr.DLL, where X is a digit. If you find that, then it's probably Visual FoxPro. Also, if you find any data files with a DBC extension, then it's Visual FoxPro.

Tamar
jrbbldr (Programmer)
9 May 12 20:51
And if Visual FoxPro, you should be posting your question in the VFP specific forum:  
   Microsoft: Visual FoxPro Forum
       forum184: Microsoft: Visual FoxPro

Good Luck,
JRB-Bldr
 
RancidFerret (IS/IT--Management)
10 May 12 12:08

It is an old DOS version, not VFP. When you launch it the window specifically says "Foxpro/LAN 2.0"

Foxpro is not connecting to Word, but rather he has a Word file saved that, when opened, imports data from the database(as I understand it). Some of the special characters that it is importing are being changed to different characters than what was entered with Foxpro. It is possible that the problem actually is with Word and not Foxpro but I am still trying to determine what exactly is causing the issue.
danfreeman (Programmer)
10 May 12 12:58

You really do need to figure out how data is getting from FPD into that Word document.

In the old days, Word/DOS knew natively how to read some forms of data and IIRC DBF files were one of those forms. With the advent of Windows, data access moved to ODBC. There can be a lot of complexity in the ODBC translation layer, and that could actually be where your problem lives.

You need to narrow down how and where the data travels before anyone can help you know what's happening to it in those travels. If you find out that ODBC is involved, at the very least you need to know which ODBC driver is in use (and whether it's different from what was used before), and how the connection is set up.
cricket (TechnicalUser)
10 May 12 18:00

Change the Word font to courier just to see what happens.
jrbbldr (Programmer)
10 May 12 18:16

he has a Word file saved that, when opened, imports data from the database(as I understand it)

While it has been 1,000 years since I did work in FPD, I seem to remember (many times NOT the best choice) making things like this work with DDE.

And, yes, the OLD WORD could use DBF files as a data source for its MailMerge

Regardless, like Dan has suggested above, you need to get into the code and figure out how this is being done and then 'walk' through it carefully to find out what is going wrong.

One other IMPORTANT thing to check especially with OLD programs...
I am guessing that this application used to just fine a while ago and now it is not.

WHAT CHANGED?
And not necessarily in the application itself, but what else?
* workstation OS's
* workstation versions of MS Office
* new or differently configured virus programs
* etc.

Typically the 'what changed' is the source of the problem and sometimes that can be fixed and sometimes that mandates changes to the application.

Good Luck,
JRB-Bldr
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