[madoues]

Hi,

I'd like to get rid of question marks replacing french characters in my "pro" files.

Since restarting to play last September, all my french "pro" files have question marks all over the place.
I know my songs enough to overcome this which I have been doing, but it is a nuisance.

It appears changes were made to text decoding that results in these question marks replacing french characters.

If I edit the file in Mobile sheets, these question marks are displayed also in the edit screen, but if I type the character in place, it looks OK except when I save it can be ok or not depending on the encoding setting. I tried to just change the encoding from the text display options on the song screen, but it does nothing. Nothing in MS settings seems to address this. I have never had a problem like this before in Mobile sheets.

What can I do to fix this, I really don't know where to go from here?

Sincerely,
Dan

[Zubersoft]

Dan,

Go to Settings->Text File Settings and switch "Display File Encodings" if it's not currently enabled. Next, load your song, tap the center of the screen to bring up the song overlay, tap the A at the top right, then Text Display Settings, and then change the file encoding dropdown to something different. One of the encodings should work properly. MobileSheets is not able to automatically detect the encoding in your file for some reason. In order to prevent this problem, make sure that you are using the UTF-8 encoding for your text files before importing them.

Mike

[madoues]

Dan,

Go to Settings->Text File Settings and switch "Display File Encodings" if it's not currently enabled. Next, load your song, tap the center of the screen to bring up the song overlay, tap the A at the top right, then Text Display Settings, and then change the file encoding dropdown to something different. One of the encodings should work properly. MobileSheets is not able to automatically detect the encoding in your file for some reason. In order to prevent this problem, make sure that you are using the UTF-8 encoding for your text files before importing them.

Mike

The same files displayed correctly in MS at least until last June.
All my files have always been UTF-8 from at least 10 years ago.
I just checked a few of them with an online encoding detector which confirmed they are UTF-8.

I opened a file and the text encoding showed ASCII, so I switched it to UTF-8.
That seems to have fixed many if not most of the files. !!GREAT!!!

But there are still files that have a problem even though the encoding shows UTF-8.
If I edit the file, I can retype correct characters and they now display correctly.
After saving, there is a mixture of correct characters and questions marks where the characters have not been retyped.
This means changing manually the bad files works, so it depends how many files are left with the problem.

For some reason, the problem was that the default setting was at ASCII instead of UTF-8.
I don't remember touching this setting, but am not sure...
At least from now on, new files will be detected correctly.

Is there a way in MS to redetect all the files without changing anything else in the song fields and audio files associations?
In other words without deleting the song and re-importing it?

Anyway, the biggest part of the problem is now solved for me.
Worst case, I can make a note of the bad files as I see them, and correct them when I have time.
But an automated solution that solves all of them at the same time would be a godsend.

Thank you once again for your support.
Sincerely,
Dan

[Zubersoft]

Dan,

You'd have to run a SQLite query against the database. I can walk you through this if you feel comfortable doing that. You can download a free SQLite editor like SQLite Studio (https://sqlitestudio.pl/) to run the query, and it will update every file in the database at once.

Mike

[madoues]

OK, thanks Mike.

I'll download it and see if I can understand how to make it work.

If it's not too complicated, I will take your offer.

Otherwise, I will just see as I use MS from now on to see if many files are still bad.
It may just be a handful of files, it's hard to know at this point.

I'll will come back later after I try the program.

Dan

[Zubersoft]

If you run this query, it will update every text and chord pro file to use UTF-8 encoding:

UPDATE TextDisplaySettings SET Encoding = 0

Let me know if you run into any issues.

Mike

[madoues]

Much thanks, Mike!

That worked like a charm. There were 3 french songs left with question marks, 
but those were the 3 that I had played with when troubleshooting this issue.
They had a mixture of correct characters and question marks and that I had marked as being UTF-8 when testing.

So it just took about 5 minutes to fix them.

Wow, I love this SQLite program!!! I will try to get to know it better in the future.
(Don't worry, I will not venture into anything if there is a possibility of breaking things, and always make backups first)

I have a few other issues with pro files, but will eventually start another thread for this.

Sincerely,
Dan