We used the old JavaDBF library created by Anil Kumar to read DBF data for a long time and are planning to switch to your fork now.
Some time ago, MS-EXCEL was able to read and write DBF data (current versions can only read). So we have several files, where users used EXCEL to edit DBF data.
Unfortunately, EXCEL was not writing the DBF format correctly. We experienced the following:
columns defined to contain numbers (e.g. N8.2) without any contents are "converted" to character (C) types.
a character length was inserted (e.g. C8)
the decimal count of the former numeric format was NOT reset to zero, resulting in an irregular type definition (e.g C8.2).
DBFField.adjustLengthForLongCharSupport() added support for 2-byte length character fields (which was a 'hack' of some old PC programs).
This leads the DBFReader to crash because it now expects a large number of characters (520 in the example above).
I implemented a simple boolean flag to be able to turn off this 'feature' so that we can read mangled MS-EXCEL files without the support for the 'Clipper and FoxPro' data formats.
Please see column 'FLUGHOEHE' in the example DBF attached (which is read correctly by LibreOffice, for example):
albfernandez
commented
4 years ago
We used the old JavaDBF library created by Anil Kumar to read DBF data for a long time and are planning to switch to your fork now.
Some time ago, MS-EXCEL was able to read and write DBF data (current versions can only read). So we have several files, where users used EXCEL to edit DBF data.
Unfortunately, EXCEL was not writing the DBF format correctly. We experienced the following:
DBFField.adjustLengthForLongCharSupport() added support for 2-byte length character fields (which was a 'hack' of some old PC programs).
This leads the DBFReader to crash because it now expects a large number of characters (520 in the example above).
I implemented a simple boolean flag to be able to turn off this 'feature' so that we can read mangled MS-EXCEL files without the support for the 'Clipper and FoxPro' data formats.
Please see column 'FLUGHOEHE' in the example DBF attached (which is read correctly by LibreOffice, for example):
wrong-exented-character-field.zip