Can anyone explain to me why FileMaker polutes text exports (specifically Export Field Contents on a text field)? For example... If I simply copy and paste text from an FM text field into a text editor and view in hex, I get this:

But when I export the same field contents I get this:

This is playing havoc with my attempts to generate ICS calendar fields that can be picked up and imported by Outlook. Outlook is not happy with all the hidden ascii junk (00 separators between all characters and the FF FE header characters at the beginning of the file.

Anyone encounter this before and have a quick solution?

Thanks all.

David Wolfe

Fishers, IN

Edited March 23, 200916 yr by Guest

It's not ASCII junk, but UTF-16 encoding. That's what Filemaker uses when you export field contents. The solution is to export through XML.

Thanks for the reply, comment. I don't suppose there is a quick how-to on doing that that you can point me to, is there? Seems like a lot of trouble to just get text to export as plain text.

Edited March 23, 200916 yr by Guest

I believe this has come up before - have you tried searching for "vCard"?

Having just been through this (for about the 4th time in 2 years), I suggest you load one of the XML style sheet examples (usually they've been posted by Fenton) and then script an XML Export. Make sure the sheet specifies UTF-8 and then tune it according to the exact character mapping your other application is expecting. Common choices for PCs are Windows-ANSI, Windows-1252, and ISO-8859. Pay close attention to how "smart quote" characters turn out. Lastly, here's a link to more than you'll want to know about character sets. tutorial

Good luck. FileMaker doesn't make this easy.