problem in data recording from custom/html items

[Sven]

I seem to have the same problem. R stops reading my csv data at the strange character. The proposed solution however did not help in my case. I tried character set definitions iso-8859-1, windows-1252, utf-8 and us-ascii without success. I am using IE 7.

Any other ideas?


Edit: As a workaround, I now use GNU sed to remove the characters. In case someone has the same problem and uses R, here's how I do it (be sure to adapt the paths):

mydataframe <- read.csv(pipe("C:/Programme/GnuWin32/bin/sed.exe -e \"s/\\c@//g\" \"C:/path/to/questionnaire.csv\""), header=TRUE, sep=",", quote="", stringsAsFactors=FALSE, comment.char="", fileEncoding="latin1")

I still think it would be preferable if MediaLab would take care of clean data files.

[johann.jacoby]

I seem to have the same problem. R stops reading my csv data at the strange character. The proposed solution however did not help in my case. I tried character set definitions iso-8859-1, windows-1252, utf-8 and us-ascii without success. I am using IE 7.

Any other ideas?

in my original troubles with this, i finally resorted to delete these null characters using a decent editor, i think it was notepad++ [<http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download>]. if i remember correctly, it allows to search [using <\0>] and replace [by nothing] the null characters.
notepad++ is a powerful free software (free as in beer and speech) for windows. so you would have to do search and replace by hand in any data file you have. batch procedures may make that easier if you have many data files.
in general (and especially under linux) you should be able to do this search & replace, possibly with some regular expression trickery or so, in any solid text editor. it is quite the pain in the butt to do it the first time, but i found - even without remembering exactly how i did it in a particular instance, that it will come back very quickly next time around.
make sure you try it out on a copy of a data file first and then if it works alright go on to the original files to prevent data loss.

hope this helps.

johann