Names Gibberish in Downloads

[casadecoqui]

Rebekah:

One of my wish list favorites.

Is there any way to add recognition code for diacritics (accented vowels and such) so that our downloaded lists are not half full of gibberish?

I am sure that this would impact many other groups and individuals who are using Spanish, Czech, Portuguese or other languages in their first names, surnames and cities to name just a few instances.

Find and replace is a great utility in Excel spreadsheets but when there are so many errors, it is extremely tedious to correct.

Now that downloading of all matches is possible, it would be so much more helpful. More so with the increase in Family Finder testing from the Holidays.

Thanks for all you are doing!
Ana

[JOlson]

Character Encoding

The culprit may be "Character Encoding". If so, the trick is to figure out the encoding of the source, and tell your application how to interpret it. I did a help search in Excel and found this:

http://www.excel-answers.com/microsoft/Excel-Worksheet/34982029/character-encoding.aspx

The link refers to an older version of Excel, so some of the tab names have changed slightly, but the idea should remain the same.

Hint: UTF-8 is pretty common. So is ISO-8859-1

(A little bit of input from FTDNA tech would be helpful here)

John

[JohnG]

This is a big deal in usability. It would be especially important if FTDNA wants to serve global clients, but it affects names like O'Malley that are common in the US as well as names in Danish, German, etc.