It is common for information to include special symbols, such as:
The degree symbol: °
The registered symbol: ®
The Angstrom symbol: Å
It can be difficult to transfer information that contains these symbols between Cradle and other tools - particularly Microsoft Excel and particularly in CSV files.
The problem is that the character encoding used inside Cradle is UTF-8, but this is not the standard character encoding in Excel. Often, the character encoding used inside Microsoft tools is based on the 'code page' set in your PC.
So, to reliably move information between Excel and Cradle in CSV files, we recommend:
Check your code page by opening a Command Prompt and running the command: chcp
For most European or US PCs, the result is likely to be: 850
Generate the CSV file from Excel, which will be in this encoding
Use the iconv utility to convert this file to UTF-8. The iconv utility is widely available. We include it within the Cradle software distribution, inside:
Windows: %CRADLEHOME%\bin\exe\win32pc
Linux: $CRADLEHOME/bin/exe/linux-ia32
Solaris $CRADLEHOME/bin/exe/sparcs2
The form of the command is:
iconv -f input-encoding-t output-encoding input-file> output-file