Issue saving unicode characters in the PP Connect datamapper

OL Connect Professional
1

Hi PP Connect wizards,

Hope you are all okay and well.

I think there is an issue with the datamapper, in particular unicode characters. The issue is I’m doing a repeat extraction, there is a condition to check for some text. This is so that I can stop extrating, then Goto next content then continue extrating some more text. So the check I have put includes some text like “e blah blah”.
This character looks like this image

See image, it’s simple…
image

Then, when saving the datamapper is okay. Closing and re-opening the datamapper project I get an error as below.
image

When I dive into the contents of the datamapper with 7zip and remove this character in the file “dataminingconfig.xml”, then I’m able to open the datamapper without any issue. It’s not an issue at the moment, but a little annoying when can’t see what broke the datamapper. Any solution using this character but without breaking the datamapper?

Thanks for you help in advance.

2

Could you post a properly anonymized version of your data mapping configuration file? It would help us come up with a workaround (if there is any).

3

Hi @Phil,

See attached sample, hope it helps.
Test Sample.zip (4.3 KB)

Thanks in advance.

4

Unfortunately, that’s an limitation of XML : most characters under ASCII value 32 cannot be embedded in an XML file (in your case, the image character is ASCII 27).

While this type of characters can still be extracted, its literal value cannot be used inside of conditions because each operand of the condition has to be stored in the DataMapper file, which uses XML format.

I would recommend pre-parsing the data file with Workflow to replace such characters with a valid XML value that is unlikely to be used in the data file (for instance, ASCII 169: ®) and then use that character inside your condition.