Backslash, Excel, and UTF-8

I’m simply reporting some strange behavior. It’s most likely not specific to a web app, but since the problem appeared in a web app, I’m reporting it here.

For a medical questionnaire application we keep the questions and a bunch of text in an Excel spreadsheet. This makes it easy for the doctors to maintain (someday I may make a maintenance app for them). When we’re ready to use the revised text, I export the spreadsheet as tab-delimited. All of a sudden the English version started to crash. The message from Xojo was not particularly helpful. It reported that something was wrong with the format but not where in the program.

I finally commented out all the places on the page where text was being set until it didn’t crash. Then uncommented things until I found the on where the crash occurred. So at this point I knew where it was and what piece of text.

Since I was using Excel, I needed a way to indicate where I might want a newline or two so I used "
" to so indicate. Apparently the backslash is causing the problem. This was verified when I opened the file with TextWrangler. It doesn’t crash but does warn of a problem with the UTF-8.

Exporting the Excel file as UTF-16 does not have the problem.

Hope this helps someone.

-Bob

instead of
use EndOfLine

http://documentation.xojo.com/index.php/EndOfLine

Marcel,

Yes. But the text is being imported from a text file. Also, I need to export as UTF-16 to support the Spanish version so I might as well be consistent.

-Bob