Problem with the "Read Delimited Spreadsheet VI"

[Michael_1122]

Hello,

I try to read a csv file with LabVIEW. 

This is my VI for reading the csv file:

This is the ";" delimited csv-file, which I want to read:

This is what I get:

As you can see, there is a "0" in the first column and first row.

Does anybody know what causes this behaviour?

Thank you very much in advance.

Best regards,

Michael

[JensG69]

Hello Michael,

I assume there is an (or several) additional character(s) at the start of your file.

For further analysis either upload the file or look at it in binary form.

Regards, Jens

[Michael_1122]

Hello Jens,

thank you very much for your quick reply.

I attached the the file to this reply.

Best regards,

Michael

[GerdW · Accepted solution]

Hi Michael,

as Jens told you: there are some additional bytes at the beginning of your file!

You probably edited that file using a text editor (like Notepad) instead of creating it directly from Excel…

See this view of your textfile using a hex viewer:

The first 3 bytes are used to determine the UTF status of that text file. LabVIEW doesn't handle those bytes explicitely and when reading a delimited text file it tries to convert that file content like any other file content…

[pincpanter · Accepted solution]

Your file contains a three-byte Byte Order Mark (BOM) declaring that the file is encoded in UTF-8. In this case, it's a useless information since all characters are ASCII. LabVIEW does not support BOMs anyway.

You may set your editor options to avoid writing the BOM. As an alternative, open your file with Notepad, then choose Save As... setting ASCII as encoding options. See below (doing a little translation to your language):

[pincpanter]

---

@pincpanter  ha scritto:

 As an alternative, open your file with Notepad, then choose Save As... setting ASCII as encoding options.

---

I meant ANSI, not ASCII...

[billko]

I think Notepad will make some guesses according to your localization.  I think that it will add BOM if you have non-English localization?  Something along those lines?

[pincpanter]

---

@billko  ha scritto:

I think Notepad will make some guesses according to your localization.  I think that it will add BOM if you have non-English localization?  Something along those lines?

---

Not always. If I create form scratch a file with non-ASCII-standard characters, Notepad generates a UTF-8 file (i mean with multi-bytes characters), but does not prepend a BOM.

Honestly, all this character representation stuff is often a mess to me.

[billko]

---

@pincpanter wrote:

---

@billko  ha scritto:

I think Notepad will make some guesses according to your localization.  I think that it will add BOM if you have non-English localization?  Something along those lines?

---

Not always. If I create form scratch a file with non-ASCII-standard characters, Notepad generates a UTF-8 file (i mean with multi-bytes characters), but does not prepend a BOM.

Honestly, all this character representation stuff is often a mess to me.

---

Yes, I'm not sure exactly how it works, either, which is why I avoid working with Notepad.exe if at all possible.

[Michael_1122]

Hello GerdW,

you were right. Thank you very much for your reply.

Best regards,

Michael