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UTF-8 Error Legacy OpenStudio

asked 2016-06-22 10:55:19 -0600

updated 2021-05-07 09:41:23 -0600

I am attempting to open an old .idf file, created in DesignBuilder. I am using EnergyPlus v8.2, Sketchup v2014, and the Legacy OpenStudio plugin version 1.0.12. I tried upgrading the file to the most recent EnergyPlus version and use the plugin version 1.0.14, but was still getting the same error. I opened the Ruby Console when attempting to open the file (as suggested here), and got the following error:

Error: #ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8

What does this mean, and what can be done to fix it? A link to the file can be found here.

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1

DOE blocks dropbox so I can't see your file. But a UTF-8 error indicates that you have a bad character somewhere. If you open the file in notepad, the character will appear as \xxx\yyy. At that point you can just delete it or change it to something else.

__AmirRoth__'s avatar __AmirRoth__  ( 2016-06-22 12:54:25 -0600 )edit

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answered 2016-06-22 13:13:49 -0600

updated 2016-06-22 13:17:00 -0600

You have a bunch of non UTF-8 characters in your file, all are comments auto generated from Design Builder, 342 lines to be exact (I'm on my mac so I ran grep -axv '.*' Indio_e+_Out_V820.idf to find that).

Example line 19992:

! Block 45, Zone 1, External roof - 53∞ Slope 6.15 ft2, Surface Area: 6.15ft2

Here is a link to an UT8 encoded file.

(I used iconv -f MACROMAN -t UTF-8 Indio_e+_Out_V820.idf > Indio_e+_Out_V820_utf8.idf)

On Windows, I usually use Notepad++ to convert a file from an encoding to another (see this)

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Asked: 2016-06-22 10:55:19 -0600

Seen: 251 times

Last updated: Jun 22 '16