hello,
if this has been discussed elsewhere in the forum I did not find it after an extensive search. i have found a solution to this conundrum now maybe this can save someone else who wrestles with the same thing some trouble.
when using an html file in medialab and collecting several variables from a form in that file (e.g., using dummy variables), medialab kept recording a null character at the end of the value of the last variable in the form (regardless of which variable is last in the form definition, and regardless of where it is written in the data file depending on its alphabetical name). this happened for both text/csv files as well as spss files. the result was a royally screwed up spss file with funny characters in it and text files of which i had to always clean out these null characters first before being able to read them into, say, R for analyses. it seems that this null character originates from the post data that medilab intercepts from the html file and then further processes. these null characters show up in a decent editor (notepad++) as marked in this image:
null character.jpg
i have now found out that the the problem was with the internet explorer (who would have thunk?) running on my own and our lab machines, which displays the html pages within medialab. these ies used a special character encoding as a default encoding leading to these null characters, for i finally got rid of the null characters in the recording of the data when i explicitly indicated another character encoding for the form alone or in the head of the html file, respectively, like so:
form:
orPHP Code:
<form name="form1" method="post" accept-charset="ISO-8859-1">
head:
so if you're getting weird data recording check if your ie uses f%§$"&d up non-standard character encodings and make it explicit that you do not want that. in the form or for the entire html file.PHP Code:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
possibly try out different encodings until the data recording goes as smoothly as mine does now.
may some deity strike down upon windows' own, non-standard character encodings!
best,
johann