Lotus Notes 8.5: Export View to csv file Chinese Characters File read by python script

Question

I am exporting a view data in Lotus Notes 8.5 to a csv file. The way I am doing the export is select the view and click File/Export, then select CSV foramt.

Originally, in File/Preferences/Regional Settings Import/Export Characters: It is using Western European and US[Windows]. The problem is that all Chinese characters become ?????,?????.

If changed to Unicode(UTF-8), then I am facing a strange thing is that: Say the file starts with "authors,editdates,requestors...', if I open the file in a Python script, use the csv reader to read the values, the very first value instead of "authors", it reads "\uad\efd\gsdfauthors". It seems the file is prepended with some UTF-8 characters.

And what's more, the field in the file also has this problem, a value "Print (ad)" becomes "Print \sdsx\sdxdf\sdf(ad)". It also has some strange UTF-8 characters.

Answer 1

That's a Byte Order Mark. It is part of the Unicode standard. It tells the reading software whether multibyte char sequences are encoded in big endian or little endian format. You can read about it here.