Data Integration Best Practices

Removal of non-UTF-8
characters in Source Files

Learn why non-UTF-8 characters break modern data pipelines and how to implement robust strategies for cleansing your data at scale.

Read Summary Download PDF Version
White Paper
Volume 9.4 | Data Quality Series
01

What are non-UTF-8 characters?

Computers process bits—binary digits 1 and 0. Character encoding is the numerical representation of human-readable alphabets and symbols. UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format – 8-bit) is the most widely used character encoding on the web.

"Non-UTF-8 characters are sequences of bytes in a data file that do not conform to the UTF-8 encoding standard, often causing system failures, data corruption, or display issues in modern applications."
02

The History & Complexity

The ASCII Era (1963)

Standard 8-bit ASCII supports 256 combinations. While popular, it lacks multi-lingual support and complex mathematical symbols.

The Multi-Encoding Challenge

Before UTF-8, schemes like ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252 were common. Today, “non-UTF-8” data often originates from legacy systems using these older formats.

03

Impact on Data Pipelines

  • ETL Failure: Most modern ETL tools fail when encountering unexpected byte sequences.
  • Database Constraints: Databases configured for UTF-8 will reject rows containing malformed characters.
  • Data Loss: Poorly handled removal can lead to partial data loss or misalignment of columns.

Receive the Full Whitepaper

Fill out the form below to receive the complete PDF whitepaper on Data Integration Best Practices.

Name(Required)