VERY Weird Issue with MS Word and Text Files

[gr8gonzo]

Hi,
I'm in the process of converting a client over to an SQL database, but they are currently using a Perl program that writes to a pipe-delimited flat file. The client usually opens up each file with MS Word, and does what he/she needs to do with it, but he/she occasionally receives a notice when trying to open the file, saying that the file needs to be converted to something else like Unicode. But the files are completely text-only files. It only happens with a couple files and I cannot find any pattern to it. If I open up the file in Notepad and copy and paste the contents to a new file and then open it up in MS Word, I still get the notice.

I have a sample file ZIPped up here:

http://www.sitecreative.com/weird.zip

If someone could help me out, I would really appreciate it. This is defying my limited intelligence.

- Jonathan

 

[GeekGirlau]

Jonathan, I didn't get an error message opening the file (don't you hate that! :-s ), however I also tried opening the file in Excel. I don't know whether this sample file is fairly standard, but you are not getting the same type of data in the fields for every record. In the last record (as one example) the final field is empty, but it looks like it's missing some data about half a dozen fields back, so what should have been in the last field appears one field earlier (hope this makes sense).

Try opening this file in Excel as a pipe-delimited text field and you'll see what I mean - I think the problem is more likely to be the way the data is extracted.