export from filemaker and import to mysql

causing problems

[tyrone04]

I am working with two different databases: filemaker and mysql. The filemaker database is updated on a weekly basis and I have to export that updated data from filemaker into a mysql database once per week. Some of you might wonder what the point is of doing it this way, why not just update the mysql database instead? The answer is that it's a long story and it has to be done like this for now.

So my problem is that some characters are showing up funny in the import in mysql. But when you look at it in filemaker, everything looks normal. For example, in filemaker the title field shows: "A grower's guide", but in mysql it turns into: "A GrowerÕs guide". Notice that the apostrophe turned into Õ. At first we thought because "smart quotes" was turned on in filemaker that features uses non-ascii characters to create curly quotes and apostrophes. So we turned "smart quotes" off. But then instead of Õ, the apostrophe turned into ?. The apostrophe is not the only character that causes the problem. Some spanish characters (a with a tilda on top, etc.) are doing the same thing too.

Has anyone experienced this kind of problem before and were you able to solve it?

Thanks!

[ergophobe]

I have had exactly this issue when converting a DB from Access to MySQL.

Just because you turned off smart quotes, you may still have some in the original data or, if you are pasting data from Word or something like that, you may still have it. I'm still guessing it's a charcater encoding issue.

As a simple test, look at the mysql data in your web browser and manually change the character encoding. Try Windows-1252 for example, or the Mac equivalent for the Latin-1 char set.

For more info, look in the forum Library (link at top left) for an article on Unicode encoding.