I am Facing an below pipe delimiter issue in SSIS.
CRLF Pipe delimited text file:
-----------------------------
Col1|Col2 |Col3
1 |A/C No|2015
2 |A|C No|2016
Because of embedded pipe within pipes SSIS failing to read the data.
Bad news: once you have a file with this problem, there is NO standard way for ANY software program to correctly parse the file.
Good news: if you can control (or affect) the way the file is generated to begin with, you would usually address this problem by including what is called a "Text Delimiter" (for example, having field values surrounded by double quotes) in addition to the Field Delimiter (pipe). The Text Delimiter will help because a program (like SSIS) can tell the field values apart from the delimiters, even if the values contain the Field Delimiter (e.g. pipes).
If you can't control how the file is generated, the best you can usually do is GUESS, which is problematic for obvious reasons.
Related
I am developing an integration in IIB and one of the requirements for output (multiple CSV files) is a comma delimiter instead of semicollon. Semicolon is is on the input. Im using two mapping nodes to produce separate files from one input, but struggle to find option for delimiter.
There are two mapping nodes that uses xsd shemas and .maps to produce output.
First mapping creates canonical dfdl format that is ready to be parsed to multipe files in second mapping node.
There is not much code. just setup in IIB
I would like to produce comma separated CSV instead of semicollon.
Thanks in advance
I found a solution. You can simply view and edit the xsd code in text editor and change the delimiter there.
I have several files which include various strings in different written languages. The files I am working with are in the .inf format which is somewhat similar to .ini files.
I am inputting the text from these files into a parser which considers the [ symbol as the beginning of a 'category'. Therefore, it is important that this character does not accidentally appear in string sequences or parsing will fail because it interprets these as "control characters".
For example, this string contains some Japanese writings:
iANSProtocol_HELP="�C���e��(R) �A�h�o���X�g�E�l�b�g���[�N�E�T�[�r�X Protocol �̓`�[���������щ��z LAN �Ȃǂ̍��x�#�\�Ɏg�����܂��B"
DISKNAME ="�C���e��(R) �A�h�o���X�g�E�l�b�g���[�N�E�T�[�r�X CD-ROM �܂��̓t���b�s�[�f�B�X�N"
In my text-editors (Atom) default UTF-8 encoding this gives me garbage text which would not be an issue, however the 0x5B character is interpreted as [. Which causes the parser to fail because it assumes that this is signaling the beginning of a new category.
If I change the encoding to Japanese (CP 932), these characters are interpreted correctly as:
iANSProtocol_HELP="インテル(R) アドバンスト・ネットワーク・サービス Protocol はチーム化および仮想 LAN などの高度機能に使われます。"
DISKNAME ="インテル(R) アドバンスト・ネットワーク・サービス CD-ROM またはフロッピーディスク"
Of course I cannot encode every file to be Japanese because they may contain Chinese or other languages which will be written incorrectly.
What is the best course of action for this situation? Should I edit the code of the parser to escape characters inside string literals? Are there any special types of encoding that would allow me to see all special characters and languages?
Thanks
If the source file is in shift-jis, then you should use a parser that can support it, or convert the file to UTF-8 before you parse it.
I believe that this character set also uses ASCII as it's base type but it uses 2 bytes to for certain characters, so if 0x5B it probably doesn't appear as the 'first byte' of a character. (note: this is conjecture based on how I think shift-jis works).
So yea, you need to modify your parser to understand shift-jis, or you need to convert the file to UTF-8 before parsing. I imagine that converting is the easiest.
I am working in Swift although perhaps the language is not as relevant, and I am creating a relatively simple CSV file.
I wanted to ask for some recommendations in creating the files, in particular:
Should I wrap each column/value in single or double quotes? Or nothing? I understand if I use quotes I'll need to escape them appropriately in case the text in my file legitimately has those values. Same for \r\n
Is it ok to end each line with \r\n ? Anything specific to Mac vs. Windows I need to think about?
What encoding should I use? I'd like to make sure my csv file can be read by most readers (so on mobile devices, mac, windows, etc.)
Any other recommendations / tips to make sure the quality of my CSV is ideal for most readers?
I have a couple of apps that create CSV files.
Any column value that contains a newline or the field separator must be enclosed in quotes (double quotes is common, single quotes less so).
I end lines with just \n.
You may wish to give the user some options when creating the CSV file. Let them choose the field separator. While the comma is common, a tab is also common. You can also use a semi-colon, space, or other characters. Just be sure to properly quote values that contain the chosen field separator.
Using UTF-8 encoding is arguably the best choice for encoding the file. It lets you support all Unicode characters and just about any tool that supports CSV can handled UTF-8. It avoid any issues with platform specific encodings. But again, depending on the needs of your users, you may wish to give them the choice of encoding.
My requirements are to write binary records inside a file. The binary records can be thought of as raw bytes in memory. I need a way to delimit each record, so that i can do something similar to binary search on the file. For example start in middle of file, find the next record delimited and start the search.
My question is that can ASCII such "START-RECORD" be used to delimit the binary record ?
START-RECORD, data-length, .......binary data...........START-RECORD, data-length, .......binary data...........
When starting from an arbitrary position within a file, i can simply search for ASCII String "START-DATA". Is this approach feasible?
Not in a single pass, since you're reading in binary mode or not. If you insert some strings or another pattern as "delimiter", you'd need to search for the binary representation of it while reading the file.
I am working with some click stream data and i would need to give specifications to the vendor regarding a preferred format to be consumed by SSIS.
As its URL data in the text file which column delimiter would you recommend. I was thinking pipe "|" but i realize that pipes can be used within the URL.
I did some testing to specify multiple charecters as delimiter lile |^| but when I am creating a flat file connection there is not option in SSIS. I had type these charecters. But when i went to edit the flat file connection manager it had changed to {|}^{|}. It just made me nervous to the import succeeded.
I just wanted to see if anybody has good ideas as to which would safe column delimiter to use.
Probably tab-delimited would be fairly safe, at least assuming that by "clickstream" you mean a list of URLs or something similar. But in theory any delimiter should be fine as long as the supplier quotes the data appropriately.