loading data from a flat file to table using informatica, having both english and foreign language characters like chinese

Question

I am loading data from a flat file to table using informatica, the file has both english and foreign language characters like Chinese, and others. The foreign language characters are not getting displayed properly after loading. How can this problem be solved? I could try to solve it by using UTF-16 encoding, but earlier I was using UTF-8.

Solution 1

1. Start with the Source in designer. Are you able to see the data correctly in the source qualifier preview? If not, you might want to set ff source definition encoding to UTF-8.

2. the Integration service should be running in Unicode mode and not ASCII mode. You can check this from the Integration service properties in Admin Console.

3. The target should be UTF-8 encoding.

   • Check the relational connection ( if the target is a database) encoding in workflow manager to ensure it is UTF-8
   • If the problem persists, write the output to a utf-8 flatfile and check if the data is loading properly. If yes, then the issue is with writing to the database.
   • Check the database settings like NLS_LANG, NLS_CHARACTERSET (for oracle) etc.

Sadagopan

Solution 2

You need to find out the encoding for the Integration Service that runs the workflow of the loading. Informatica supports three different encoding for this, utf-8, ascii and windows-1252, you need to make sure yours is utf-8. You also need to tell the source qualifier for the workflow to use the right encoding to read the file (could be utf-8 or utf-16). And finally you must make sure your database tables are using an encoding that supports chinese.