Re: [mdb-dev] mdb-export encoding issue (solved)

[Rob H. <rh...@me...>]

Hi All,

In case anyone else comes across the same problem in the future, we have
found a solution.

It's a bit unintuitive, but when I tried setting the */MDBICONV/*
variable to CP1252, our extended characters exported correctly.  So, the
command that worked for us is:

MDBICONV="CP1252" mdb-export test-forum.mdb tblThread

On 10/06/17 15:08, Rob Hills wrote:
> I am debugging a project to convert a Forum from WebWiz to phpBB. 
> WebWiz stores its data in an Access DB and our phpBB forum will be on
> MySQL.
>
> I am using mdb-tools version 0.7.1 on Ubuntu 16.04LTS 64-bit. 
> According to mdb-ver, the mdb file I am working with is JET4.
>
> The problem I am trying to solve involves forum post text that
> includes some characters outside the basic character set.  A specific
> example is the "half space" character whose UTF-8 representation I
> believe is the 3-byte sequence E2 80 89.  My problem is that when I
> use mdb-export, these characters end up being converted to   (Hex:
> C3 A2 E2 82 AC E2 80 B0).
>
> If I open this database in M$Access and use its export tool, I end up
> with the expected UTF-8 representation of these characters in my
> output file (E2 80 89).
>
> I've Googled extensively and tried various permutations of the
> MDB_JET3_CHARSET and MDBICONV environment variables without any change
> to the output.
>
> For example the following command
>
>     mdb-export test-forum.mdb tblThread
>
> produces exactly the same output as:
>
>     MDB_JET3_CHARSET="UTF-8" mdb-export test-forum.mdb tblThread
>
...

Hope this helps someone else...

-- 
Rob Hills
Waikiki, Western Australia
Mobile: +61 (412) 904-357