spanish accents not recognized when imported

nadiamireles

hi,

I imported all my references from refworks, where I had them neatly organized. Accents from references in Spanish where not imported and now I have a bunch of (/(/&)O&(/(% things instead of the accents.

I cannot imagine to fix that one by one.

maybe I did something wrong when importing?

help please!

adamsmith

did you import using RIS?
Open the file with a text editor (notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac) and paste one entry that didn't import correctly - i.e. a section from TY - to ER -
here.

The likeliest problem is that the file you exported has the wrong character encoding - that's pretty easy to fix. Are you using Windows or Mac?

aurimas

Could you elaborate on how you imported these references and provide us with an example reference you started with that produced this?

Edit: What adamsmith said.

nadiamireles

im back to my references to fix the problem, I am using mac, exported the references from refworks to then import them to zotero. I used bibtex.

I can do all over again if I need to use another format. I prefer that than having to fix one by one when they are already in zotero.


thanks

adamsmith

you'd have to look how this was in bibtex -
Zotero should be able to import accents both in their utf-8 format - Chávez - and in TeX markup - Ch\'{a}vez
If it's not in the bibtex file, obviously, Zotero can't import it.

edit: see above - post one sample bibtex entry here.

nadiamireles

this is one example of how it was in bibtex

@article{RefWorks:10,
author={P. G. Altbach and Jane Knight},
year={2006},
title={Visión panorámica de la internacionalización en la educación superior: motivaciones y realidades},
journal={Perfiles Educativos},
volume={XXVIII},
pages={pp. 13-39},
language={español}

adamsmith

yeah, that was clearly messed up by Refworks - the easiest way to fix this is probably to just do a search and replace in the whole bibtex file in a text editor:
i.e. replace
ó with ó
á with á
ñ with ñ
etc. (you'd have to see what became of é, ú, and í and any ¡¿ signs in the text.

nadiamireles

yeah, I was thinking that too just a minute ago...

what a mess! I checked one by one on refworks, but the problem is when exporting, I checked all formats and it is exporting always with the same error.

well, thanks for the help!

aurimas

This is UTF8 being interpreted as ISO-8859-1.

There are other ways to re-encode this, but you can go to http://www.unicodetools.com/unicode/utf8-to-latin-converter.php paste your text and concert from UTF8 to Latin

aurimas

I made that last post in a bit of a rush, so I just wanted to clear some things up.

First, a bit on UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 (or any other 8-bit encoding scheme). ISO-8859-1 uses 1 byte (8 bits) to encode a character that gets displayed on your screen. That lets you encode 256 characters before you run out of ways to represent them. UTF-8 introduced the ability to display all Unicode characters (practically every character you will ever encounter) by using multiple bytes to represent a character. So for instance ó is encoded with two bytes.

The "problem" (in your case) is that if you have a UTF-8 encoded document and you try to interpret it as ISO-8859-1 encoded document, you will be looking at each byte individually. So for the character "ó" you would be considering each byte separately and get à and ³.

I've created a RefWorks account tried exporting some entries with accented characters. Here's the catch. When exporting, RefWorks does not supply any encoding information, so your browser interprets it with whatever you have set to be the default encoding. In your case, I imagine this is set to ISO-8859-1. When you copied the text, the browser told the clipboard that the data is ISO-8859-1 encoded and then Zotero interpreted it as such.

You have 2 options.

1) Tell your browser to interpret the page as UTF-8. This varies depending on what browser you use.

2) Instead of copying the file, save it (something like "Save Page As", again, depending on the browser) and then import it into Zotero (via Gears menu -> Import). Since encoding information is not associated with a file (for the most part), Zotero will assume that it is UTF-8 and import properly.

kaiserso

When you import Zotero tries to autodetect (and can fail if encoding information is not available, I just had this problem when exporting from Jabref on Windows and importing to Zotero on Mac). However, in the Zotero settings you can set the import encoding to UTF-8 manually to solve this problem.