file/FTP adapter, outbound channel, content conversion, UTF-8 (Unicode)?

[Former Member]

We would like to send "delimited" files to another application (tab-delimited, CSV, ... - the other application does not support XML-based interfaces). Obviously we will have an outbound channel that uses the file/FTP adapter and the data will be subjected to "content conversion".

The data contains names in many languages; not all of this can be represented in ISO Latin-1, much less in US-ASCII. I suppose UTF-8 would work. The question is: how is this handled by the FTP protocol? (considering that the FTP client is part of the SAP PI file/FTP adapter and the FTP server is something on the "other" machine)

[udo_martens · Accepted solution]

Hi Peter,

you can maintain the file encoding in the outbound adapter. See [Configuring the Receiver File/FTP Adapter|http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw2004s/helpdata/en/bc/bb79d6061007419a081e58cbeaaf28/content.htm]

For your requirements "utf-8" sounds pretty fitting.

Regards,

Udo

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thank you for your reply.

The question remains: what will happen when this UTF-8 file is FTP'ed across? Can FTP handle UTF-8?

[udo_martens · Accepted solution]

No, SAP is just kidding you by givin the choice for UTF-8, but of course the FTP adapter can not handle that.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

A thought: FTP allows binary transfer mode - just a sequence of bytes. If both parties agree to interpret this sequence of bytes as UTF-8, that would solve the problem - provide they do not disagree too much on the line-end convention (CR-LF in Windows, LF in Unix).

[Former Member]

hi

refer

/people/shabarish.vijayakumar/blog/2005/08/17/nab-the-tab-file-adapter

for tabbed files.

Regards

Monika