MSD Chemstation need files under UTF-8 encoding

[rwilson0089]

Hi everyone,

Our MSD Chemstation (E.02.01.1177) is saving our files under ANSI encoding, but we need them to be UTF-8 to export into our LIMS. Is there a way to get it to automatically save under UTF-8?

Thanks!

[sbashkyrtsev]

How do you/your LIMS know which encoding the files are in? If you use only English alphabet & numbers in your sample names and other fields, then the files in both encodings will be identical. It's only when it comes to non-English alphabets that they start to differ. So.. maybe the problem is somewhat different? What does the error say?

PS: though sometimes UTF8 files have a special 2-byte header called BOM at the beginning. But it's almost always optional, it's very rare that the tools require it.

[rwilson0089]

How do you/your LIMS know which encoding the files are in? If you use only English alphabet & numbers in your sample names and other fields, then the files in both encodings will be identical. It's only when it comes to non-English alphabets that they start to differ. So.. maybe the problem is somewhat different? What does the error say?

PS: though sometimes UTF8 files have a special 2-byte header called BOM at the beginning. But it's almost always optional, it's very rare that the tools require it.

Thank you for the reply. I do not know the reasoning behind it, this direction was given by our LIMS company. They said "Duplicating the file to see that the original file was not saved as UTF-8 otherwise, the duplicate would be set to Unicode UTF-8 and not Western Mac OS Roman"