exporting text file with utf-8 encoding in ms access - sql

Question

I am exporting text files from 2 queries in ms access 2010. Queries are from different linked ODBC tables (but tables are different only by data, structure and data types are same). I set up export specification to export text file in utf-8 encoding for both files. Now here come the trouble part. When I export the queries and open them in notepad, one query is in utf-8 and second one is in ANSI. I don't know how is this possible when both queires has the same export specification and it is driving me crazy.
This is my VBA code to export queries:
DoCmd.TransferText acExportDelim, "miniflow", "qry01_CZ_test", "C:\TEST_CZ.txt", no
DoCmd.TransferText acExportDelim, "miniflow", "qry01_SK_test", "C:\TEST_SK.txt", no
I also tried to modify it by adding 65001 as coding argument by the results were same.
Do you have any idea what could be wrong?

Answer 1

Don't rely on the File Open dialog in Notepad to tell you whether a text file is encoded as "ANSI" or UTF-8. That is just Notepad's "guess" based on whether the file begins with the bytes EF BB BF, which is the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark (BOM).
Many (most?) Windows applications will include the UTF-8 BOM at the beginning of a text file that is UTF-8 encoded. Some Unicode purists insist, often quite vigorously, that the BOM is not required for UTF-8 files and should be excluded, but that is the way Windows applications tend to behave.
Unfortunately, Access does not always follow that pattern when it exports files to text. A UTF-8 text file exported from Access may omit the BOM and that can confuse applications like Notepad if they assume that a UTF-8 encoded file will always include the BOM as the first three bytes of the file.
For a more reliable way of determining the encoding of a text file consider using an application like Notepad++ to open the file. It will differentiate between the UTF-8 files with a BOM (which it designates as "UTF-8") and UTF-8 files without a BOM (which it designates as "ANSI as UTF-8")
To illustrate, consider the following Access table
When exported to text (CSV) with UTF-8 encoding,
the File Open dialog in Notepad reports that it is encoded as "ANSI"
but a hex editor shows that it is in fact encoded as UTF-8 (the character é is encoded as C3 A9, not simply E9 as would be the case for true "ANSI" encoding)
and Notepad++ recognizes it as "ANSI as UTF-8"
in other words, a UTF-8 encoded file without a BOM.