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Errror 'DBASE writer: 'unknown' is not recognized as a valid encoding name'.

  • February 14, 2024
  • 3 replies
  • 115 views

peter100
Contributor
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Cache problem?
At writing a dbf-file happens errror "DBASE writer: 'unknown' is not recognized as a valid encoding name".

  • FME(R) 2023.2.0.0 (20231201 - Build 23764 - WIN64)

  • Error happens since today
  • Feature Caching set off
  • Result files: .cpg, .dbf, ‘.dbt’
  • Each process creates 51 files of altogether 283 --> maybe a caching problem?
  • Same error happens also with DBASE writer -> character encoding 'utf-8'

Reader file:
xlsx-file (MS Office 2016)

Writer dBase (DBF) with character encoding Latin-1 Western European (iso8859-1)

  • Parameter tab --> Name-table "JPB_NR" (format: number(3,0)
  • all together 283 lines of data

DBASE writer:

  • Writing files using character encoding 'iso-8859-1'
  • OS Locale Encoding : windows-1252
  • Process Encoding   : UTF-8

Test files are in attachments.

Can anybody help?

Regards,

Steffen P.

3 replies

virtualcitymatt
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  • February 14, 2024

OK i took a look and saw something else - I indeed got the same ERROR but what I also noticed was the following line in the log:

“dBASE Writer: Maximum number of open output files reached, caching additional features until end of translation.”

I noticed that the job was able to write out 51 files fine - but as soon as trying the 52nd file then it would ERROR. I couldn’t tell you why.

What did work though was if I swapped out the Writer for a FeatureWriter and then used the GroupBy inside of it and made sure my groups were only 50 features big.

 

 


peter100
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  • 9 replies
  • February 15, 2024

Hi Matt,
thanks for your workaround. Is the GroupCounter your own transformer? He don’t exist at my end. How can I create it / rebuild?
I tested with other character encodings, e.g. Latin 2 Western European. It worked fine.

Regards

 


virtualcitymatt
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  • February 15, 2024

Oh - It’s just a custom transformer from FME Hub: GroupCounter | FME Hub (safe.com)

you can essentially swap it out for a ModuloConter if you wanted. The GroupCounter is just little nicer because the groups are ordered. 

Yes I do think it’s a bug somewhere because it seems like it’s trying to work around it - so somewhere in that workaround process I guess FME is hitting a bug. It’s worth submitting this to Safe Software support to get them to fix the bug for future releases.