[Koha] Bulkmarcimport and special characteres

[Joshua Ferraro]

On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 06:53:12PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> > From: "José Lagoas" <jlagoas at lnec.pt>
> > Second Question: The Portuguese Language uses some special characters
> > like "ã". We have used bulkmarcimport for importing our database. This
> > program changes "ão" to "ô", "ãe" to "ê " and "áu" to "ù". Have you any
> > idea how to solve this problem?
> 
> Sounds like a character encoding problem.  If bulkmarcimport is using 
> UTF-8 at last, try running:
>   iconv -f iso-8859-15 -t utf-8 -o outfile.marc infile.marc
> and then feed outfile.marc to bulkmarcimport.
Actually, this may work for UNIMARC, but it will completely corrupt a
MARC21 file because MARC21 uses MARC8 encoding (and I doubt iconv
understands MARC8). Also, iconv will not update the leader to specify
the encoding.

To properly convert from MARC8 to UTF-8, you'll need to use a MARC
editor (I think MARCEdit can do it), or you'll need to write a script to
do the conversion using one of the MARC toolkits out there.

Hope that helps,

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