I created at home in my PC a MS Access DB, where I've been storing all I
was learning, each record have different fields I typed: one I typed in
RPC (simplified chinese), another one I typed in Pinying (kind of
"latinized" chars, to sound as "figured pronounciation"), one typed in
Spanish/English.
So far, so good, I had no problems: each field always looked great.
Queries, Reports, etc all looked great.
BUT...
Obviously many words/chars were repeated thru many records.
Then I created another query (to find out single chars I should easily
recognize)
SELECT DISTINCT Diccio.Pri
FROM Diccio
ORDER BY Diccio.Pri;
Where Diccio is the main table, and Pri is just a small field I had
got/updated in each Diccio record, with just one single chinese ideogram
(character) extracted from the chinese text part of that record.
Nice: the results displayed was a list of about 600 ideograms (one for
each record).
Then I tought: well, if I could have this same list as a new table (just
one ideogram per record...), I could use it to build JOINs with the
Diccio table, etc.
Here started my problems:
I went back to the Query I mentioned above, changed it to get same
results to a new table (Query type of "Create New Table") and populated
a new table, with same number of records as the "about 600"I mentioned.
Great !
Went to check it ... and ... My God, some of the 600 expected records
had the expected ideogram... but many of the records were interleaved
(without any logic) with many blank records... to the 600 number. !!!
Obviously, I repeated everything several times... It had no sense at all.
The query would display correct results, but running the modified query
to create a new table was writing the same number of records, but MANY
of them, most, were BLANK!!!
What was happening?
I must admit I've spent many many hours digging into Access
documentation, the fact chinese text is writen using double-char set,
how Access will "compress" its text data (Unicode Compression), etc, but
was not lucky to understand what was happening.
Today, JUST BY CHANCE, I happenned to find a solution!!!
BUT it's NON SENSE...
-first I'd like to understand why things work so extremely wrong (my
opinion)
-second, want to tell everybody, just in case someone else runs into the
same problem.
Well, just as I mentioned, I was looking at the contents of the new
table, full of blank records interspersed with some good records... and
thought of "manually writing"on one of those recods the chinese char
(ideogram) it should have shown...
As I was typing it, I just saw a very small pixel that suddenly disappeared.
Tried it again, the same happenned.
The column with the 600 records with field length of just 1... had a
charwidth of 10...
That's a normal charwidth size ... for just 1 char field.
So, I changed it to 30 !!!...
and suddenly ALL RECORDS SHOWED FILLED with the ideograms they were
supposed to show !!!
You can figure out my surprise!!!
I reduced the charwidth back to 10... and the data still showed correct!!!
What was happening? It CAN'T be true!
Most records were previously showing blank...
Just changing charwidth fixed the problem???
Went back to original width of 10, and every record would still show the
correct data ????
It CAN'T be true!!!
So I recreated the problem several times. Everytime I run the query that
creates the new table, its records show, most of them, blank. Some few,
interspersed, with the expected ideogram.
Then I change charwidth for the whole column to 30, everything is fixed.
All records show OK.
I can change width back to 10, or any other value... records show
correct from then on!!!
So, what have I been doing wrong? Can MS Access display table data wrong
(should say VERY WRONG data), and that can be fixed just by changing its
width size to a larger size, then back to the original, and now
evrything is correct and working as expected????
Don't know if anybody ever run into this same situation: if so, please
can you explain what is the reason for this strange behavior?
If not, I hope this lengthy explanation helps anybody else in the future...
Thanks,
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
This mailing list archive is Copyright 1997-2024 by midrange.com and David Gibbs as a compilation work. Use of the archive is restricted to research of a business or technical nature. Any other uses are prohibited. Full details are available on our policy page. If you have questions about this, please contact
[javascript protected email address].
Operating expenses for this site are earned using the Amazon Associate program and Google Adsense.