Wednesday, December 16, 2009

CocoaTech's Path Finder - Versatile Encoding Helper

Path Finder Save as SJIS for ExcelCocoaTech's Path Finder tool is a versatile Finder replacement. One problem that you might have if you do any work with data, is importing CSV files that are in the UTF-8 format, and which contain multi-byte characters such as Japanese, into Excel.

To import a UTF-8 CSV into Excel, you need to re-save into a format that Excel will accept, because it ironically does not accept the quite-universal UTF-8. I tried opening my UTF-8 CSV with TextMate and Text Edit to do the re-save into a different encoding, but neither of those allow me to save to Shift JIS, which renders Japanese characters so Excel can import them properly.

I saw that Path Finder has a native Text Editor, and thought I would try it. Sure enough, it allows you to re-save a file in Shift JIS and with a TXT extension, which can then easily be imported into Excel, unmunged.

Thanks CocoaTech!