>>So I exported this excell spreadsheet to csv, could not import it directly into vfp, for reasons I do not even want to know.
>
>Hi Marc - Are you trying to go from Excel97 to vfp? The way that works for me is to convert to Excel5, then import. That's worked well many times...


This works well unless the excel file is marked for a codepage that is not supported by the computer doing the conversion. In this case, excel will replace any characters other than the lower ASCII with a "?". There is also a bug in the support for multibyte languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean).

For instance where "A" is a lower ASCII characer and "#" is a multibyte character:

a1 = "AAAAAAAA", a2 = "####" : Excel 97

converted on a machine that does not know how to handle the codepage

a1 = "AAAAAAAA", a2 = "????" : Excel 5.0

converted on a machine that does know how to handle the codepage

a1 = "AAAAAAAA", a2 = "##AA" : Excel 5.0

result of append from

a1 = "AAAAAAAA", a2 = "##" : Foxpro


Apparently, Excel uses a buffer to read in and then write out each cell. After cell A1 is converted, the buffer contains "AAAAAAAA". The function that copies from the cell into the buffer is told to copy 6 characters, but copies 6 bytes. The string length is written as 6 characters. Foxpro uses COM to convert the file. The dll that handles Excel files makes the same mistake again. This time the strings are zero terminated and only the truncated multibyte characters are in the Foxpro table.

Thankyou M$ for making international language support so challenging.