Letters with accents not stored/displayed correctly in data.

Christina Carriere

Hi,

Our user input data often includes letters with accents such as é, è, and ç. When querying this data, these letters with accents are replaced by a symbol:


examples:

         François shows as  Fran�ois

         Hélène shows as H�l�ne



Looking for ways to correct the storing and /or display of the data. Thanks in advance


-Christina

Spencer Lassen

I've experienced something similar with some of our records when we import in updated data from an external source and was informed it had to do with our import text source either being or note being UTF-8 coded so I just setup a report to identify records with the unknown characters and fix them on a one off basis and when fixing them on the front end it fixes the record and they query properly on our system.  

Christina Carriere

Hi Spencer,


 Thanks very much for your reply.


You wrote " it had to do with our import text source either being or note being UTF-8 coded"


Could you please elaborate? It seems as though one of the things you're trying to refer to is missing? Or am I misunderstanding?


thank you


-Christina

Spencer Lassen

It has to do with CRM's text type that needs characters to be encoded in UTF-8 format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8) in order to display special characters correctly.  There is a knowledgebase article referencing this issue here (https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/56979).  In our organization we have a number of scheduled updates that impact thousands of records daily so to resolve this issue we setup a simple custom report to scan the constituent table for instances where there is a bad character in either the keyname or the name fields from the constituent table.  Below is the SQL code that can be run to find these constiuents and we update manually as it usually ends up only being a handful of updates on a weekly basis.


SELECT LOOKUPID, CONVERT(CHAR(154),NAME) AS CONVERTEDNAME, NAME

FROM CONSTITUENT

WHERE    CONVERT(CHAR(100),KEYNAME) <> KEYNAME

OR        CONVERT(CHAR(154),NAME) <> NAME

Christina Carriere

Hi Spencer, 


Looks like this will do it. Thanks very much for your reply.


Regards

-Christina