correct character endcoding (German) for LexisNexis Export (Mac-User)

[Janine Wolf-Schindler]

Dear all,

I am desperate - I am trying to upload my corpus from LexisNexis.

I started with transforming the .trf-file into txt , which is, I know that now - the wrong thing to do. What looks nice in .trf: looks horrible in the preview of mac, thus it doesn't have the correct encoding for AntConc.

I switched to html. I got, at last, the "correct" utf 8-encoding for the Umlaute (ä,ö,ü,): religiöse 

This is better, yet it is not correct.

I changed the settings to ISO 8859-1 for both the program and the html-file. But it is still not working correctly. Doesn't change anything.

Now I don't know what to do (I also showed it so my husband who is a programmer, he tried all stuff again, without success).

I don't even dare to try the French file.

Can anyone help?

thanks :-)

   

[Laurence Anthony]

Hi Janine,

AntConc works perfectly with LexisNexis data in German, French, Japanese, Chinese, and any other language.

It seems that you are getting all your encodings mixed up. Html, txt, xlm have *nothing* to do with encodings. They are all text-based files that can be encoded in a multiple of encodings.

The simple rule for AntConc is *set the encoding of your files in the AntConc global settings*. If you know what your files are encoded in, this is straightforward. AntConc defaults to UTF-8 (the international standard), so if you save all your files in UTF-8 from the outset, then you never have to think about encodings again.

You wrote that you saved your files in UTF-8 and then changed the settings to ISO-8859-1, which just doesn't make sense. Stay in UTF-8. (And, you cannot just "change the setting" of an HTML file, anyway. You can convert an HTML file from one encoding to another, but it is not a 'setting'.)

To help matters, I have created a program called EncodeAnt that auto-detects file encodings (so you can then set that in the AntConc global settings) and also does batch auto-conversion to UTF-8, so you can just use the converted files as is. There is a good chance that you have mixed up all your encodings and have some in ASCII, some in ISO-8859-1, some in UTF-8, and others in some other encoding. EncodeAnt can handle this and convert them all to a single UTF-8 standard.

Here is the link (note that the current version only works on Windows though):

http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/encodeant/

I hope that helps.

Laurence.

###############################################################
Laurence ANTHONY, Ph.D.
Professor
Center for English Language Education in Science and Engineering (CELESE)
Faculty of Science and Engineering
Waseda University
3-4-1 Okubo, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-8555, Japan
E-mail: antho...@gmail.com
WWW: http://www.laurenceanthony.net/
###############################################################

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "AntConc-discussion" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to antconc+u...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to ant...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/antconc.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.