In this meeting, the State Changers discussed the importance of preparing and 'washing' text data to ensure it is fully compatible with certain systems, specifically highlighting the difference between how systems (like Xano and PostgreSQL) interpret text and coding characters compared to how we perceive these on a printed page. They talked about how certain characters, regardless of their usual appearance, such as curl quotations or straight up and down quotations, em dashes, and hyphens, are encoded differently and must use specific UTF codes. The meeting also addressed the potential problems posed by nonprinting characters or characters that look perfectly normal, referencing an instance of the letter 'e' being wrongly interpreted due to different generation systems. They further highlighted the value of JSON because of its explicitness about encoding and the limitations of the CSV format. This would be useful meeting to review for anyone dealing with text data preparation, character encoding issues, or working with systems like Xano or PostgreSQL where data structure interpretations are essential.
(Source: Office Hours 7/3/2023 )
