Disallowed characters in a csv or gpx file?
Sat, 02/09/2008 - 5:38pm
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17 years
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Anyone know of a list of characters that aren't allowed in the name or description fields in a csv or gpx file? I ran into a problem with the poi loader today when trying to import a gpx file that had a ' (single quote) in the description field. After some testing figured out the garmin's poi loader didn't like it.
?
All characters can be represented in a gpx file. Some of them have to be specially represented, but ( ' ) isn't normally one of them.
POI Loader's error messages are pathetic (and that's being kind!) - try renaming your .gpx to .xml and opening it in Internet Explorer - the MS XML parser will give you a detailed message if there is something wrong with the file.
The official test of a valid gpx file is here:-
http://www.topografix.com/gpx_validation.asp
This is actually validation against the schema. Sadly, files produced by Mapsource currently fail this test, because they've changed the location of their schema
.
The main cause of the problem you have seen, is when the encoding="xxxx" statement doesn't actually match the encoding of the characters in the file. If you have a gpx file that says it's encoded as "UTF-8", you can always convert the actual contents to UTF-8, by opening in Notepad and re-saving (after changing the 'encoding' option appropriately). If that fixes the problem, you need to have words with the author of the file
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