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MarcEdit Character Detection Tool

MarcEdit Character Detection Tool

MarcEdit includes a tool to check if a MARC file has UTF-8 characters or MARC-8 characters.

Table of Contents

UTF-8 vs MARC-8, why do we care?

  • UTF-8 is a newer standard for encoding text characters. It is able to encode many more international characters than MARC-8. Sierra uses UTF-8 and it assumes that loaded records are in UTF-8 format.

  • You can load a MARC with with MARC-8 characters, but many of the diacritics and international characters will come through very messed up.

  • You get things like this is Sierra:

    image-20260107-160553.png

How can I check a MARC file for character encoding?

  • Use the MarcEdit Character Detection Tool

  • The character detection tool is under Tools then Character Conversion Tools

    Select your file in the tool and click Detect:

    Click the folder button to find the file in the Windows directory, and click the Detect button.

  • This is the standard response

    image-20260107-162325.png

  • It simply says some of the records are ASCII and some are windows-1252.

  • ASCII is fine.

  • Windows-1252 is MARC-8. This is what we want to avoid.

  • Verbose Results gives detailed information about how the tool evaluates each record. This is usually not necessary.

    Results now list each record separately, and whether the tool determined it was ASCII or windows-1252.

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How do I fix a bad file?

https://marmot-support.atlassian.net/wiki/x/CwA1mQ

 

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