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LITIGATION SUPPORT TIP OF THE NIGHT

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See my post on Running Regex Searches With a Grep Utility on the ILTA litigation support blog.

New tips for paralegals and litigation support profesionals are posted to this site each week. Click on the blog headings for better detail.

See How-To Videos on my YouTube channel.

Jul 3, 2016

ALT Codes vs. ASCII Codes in Delimited Files

Sometimes a ¶ character, may be used in a delimited file to separate different columns. You enter this character, ¶, by pressing ALT + 20 [using the number on the numeric keypad]. The pilcrow or paragraph mark, ¶, may also be created in Excel by entering the formula =CHAR(20). See this example where the pilcrow is entered in column B with an alt code, ALT + 20 and in column D with that formula

When the file is then opened in a text editor like NotePad ++ the pilcrow generated by the =CHAR(20) will appear as 'DC4'.

This is because when is it exported the as a csv file, there reference will be converted to one for ASCII codes - the DC4 stands for Device Control 4. This encoding is used for the pausing of a device.

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