Export MS Access Memo field and convert Unicode

Question

I have an Access 2003 database. A table has a Memo field and I\'m having issues with getting that data out.

• Exporting that field to a txt or csv chops that fi

Answer 1

The file created by Access/VBA is UTF-16. For some reason, there is a character at the beginning of the file that was causing the Ruby YAML library to parse wrongly.

iconv to the rescue!

iconv -f UTF-16 -t ASCII -c utf_file.yml > ascii_file.yml

Answer 2

Export to .xml

Answer 3

How are you exporting? Have defined an export spec? In Access 2003, this gives you a dropdown list with all the usual encodings (code pages), including Unicode UTF8. This is also how you define your memo field as having a length greater than 255 characters.