Bringing data together with XML, CSV or TAB delimited
As a file hoster and data management company for “Joe Average” we try to keep our tools simple and straight forward. All handling must be for the masses, so fancy conversion tools, which cost something are not our first choice, if we implement data consolidation features.
We love RSS (real simple syndication), XML (extendable markup language) or CSV (comma seperated values) formats, because Mom & Pop and the guy around next corner have the possiblity to export their data in these formats, eg. with Excel or free tools on the market.
But even these simple text based formats have their obstacles. Text in these modern days is not always what you expect it to be.
There are language and character definitons. The industry moved forward to UTF-8 or even UTF-16 (formats to cope with asian characters, for example) and the tools like Excel are still using ASCII (the classic 8-bit alphabet+) to generate lists. This causes platform dependent problems, especially if you move data from Windows or Mac to servers with Linux (like ours).
Before bringing all your data in one place, be sure that you know about these little issues and that you streamline your formats to the same text format definition.
That topic is worth much more than this simple picture and I will try to come up with more examples in the next weeks and links to tools, which are great to convert.
One upfront, because I use to convert UTF-16 to UTF-8 on windows:
Unifier comes in handy, when you need to convert large chunks of text data and can be tested in a free trial version here.
