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Non-breaking spaces export to Excel = ASCII 160, not 32

691597Mar 18 2009 — edited Mar 20 2009
We found the following issue with exporting strings to Excel.
Assume the database Data field contains a string with multiple spaces "Hello____World".For the sake of readability I represent the space as '_' (underscore).
In OBIEE the normal data format setting is "Plain Text". In HTML source code the data will show up as "Hello____World" but browsers ignore the multiple spaces and show "Hello_World".
When exporting this to Excel the result in Excel is aso "Hello_World" where the ASCII value of the space character is 32.

Since this is not what i wanted, I change the data format to "Plain text (don't break spaces)".
In the HTML source this shows as "Hello    World" and the browser shows it correctly as "Hello____World"
Now I export this to Excel and Excel shows "Hello____World" as was needed.
However, when using the data in a VLOOKUP function in Excel it could not match "Hello____World" in another worksheet.
After some investigation it turned out the OBIEE exports the   to Excel as ASCII value 160. That shows up on screen as a space.
Everything looks OK but under the hood it is not 'what you see is what you get'

remedy in our case was export from OBIEE as data (CSV).

Edited by: user7310695 on Mar 18, 2009 2:53 PM

Edited by: wim_van_den_heuvel on Mar 20, 2009 8:54 AM
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