Problem opening text file

FLX TMS FlexCel for VCL & FMX
2

Hi,

Nothing is wrong with the file, it is just that it is not in UTF8 encoding, and FlexCel by default tries to open it as if it was UTF8-encoded.

This is actually one of the biggest problems with using CSV: You need to know which encoding was used to create the file. In this case I am not really sure on what encoding the file has, but it is not UTF8, since it has sequences of characters which are invalid in UTF8. When you try to open a file with encoding UTF8 and it has characters that are invalid in a UTF8 string, Delphi will just reject the full thing and return an empty string. And this is why rowcount is 0: FlexCel is looking at an empty string.

Normally, if the file was created in a "western" locale, the encoding is Win1252:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252
But it might be 1251 for example if it is a russian locale.

If you try with win1252 encoding, the number of rows is correct:



program Project59;


{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}


{$R *.res}


uses
  System.SysUtils,
  VCL.FlexCel.Core,
  FlexCel.XlsAdapter;


var
  xls: TXlsFile;
  i: integer;
  colTypes: Tarray<TColumnImportType>;
  Encoding: TEncoding;
begin
  xls := TXlsFile.Create(true);
  try
    SetLength(colTypes, 2000);
    for i := 0 to 1999 do  colTypes := TColumnImportType.Text;
    Encoding := TEncoding.GetEncoding(1252);
    try
      xls.Open('r:\Elp_95.csv', TFileFormats.Text, #9, 1, 1, colTypes, nil, Encoding, true);
    finally
      Encoding.Free;
    end;
    WriteLn(xls.RowCount);
    ReadLn;
  finally
    xls.Free;
  end;


end.

But I am not really sure the text will be the correct one. You will only get the correct text if you specify the correct encoding which was used to create the file.