Types of dashes- possible reason for getting errors

Damian_Broj_oldaccount

Hi guys,

Today’s case brought pretty interesting output that might be interesting also for you and for your future work (if not known).

 

The issue was: list member not recognized during import. User wanted to load some data into the data module using the well known name of the member getting an error message that the member used was not recognized. Member name contained a hyphen (“-“). What happened? The mentioned member name was typed in MS Word (it can be any other text editor with making your text visually beautiful automatically) typing the following string: xxx SPACE HYPHEN SPACE xxx. What was done by MS WORD? Hyphen became an En Pause/En Dash (“–“) and made the member not recognized by Anaplan.

 

You can check how many different horizontal lines exist in charset opening any of the MS family softs -> insert -> symbol and for example look for Unicode 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2212, 2500 etc. It represents how many different symbols can be visible as hyphen and probably you would not guess which was really used looking at text.

 

Learning here- i will put a double attention to avoid using hyphens or hyphen-looking signs in item’s identifier. There are many better symbols to be used that are not so easily replaced by the common software automatically

 

Cheers 😊