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I have an MS Access database, how can I determine which encoding characters are used in the database?

Johnny Bones
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Wizard4U
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2 Answers2

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ACCESS databases all use UTF-8 encoding since (at least) version 2000

Philippe Grondier
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2

I think by default it is Windows-specific ANSI "encoding", more details here:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/701920/2230844

and in the second part of this answer:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/24893224/2230844

I had one case, where the ACCESS database (.mdb) did not "fit" into ASCII in Python 2 because of ellipsis character, and str.encode('dbcs') worked for me. Not UTF-8!

Community
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denfromufa
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  • I referred to the second part of the linked answer: "Be careful though; most people talking about ANSI refer to one of the Windows codepages; you may really have a file in CP (codepage) 1252, which is almost, but not quite the same thing as ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1). If so, use cp1252 instead of latin-1 as the encoding parameter." – denfromufa May 25 '15 at 21:27