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.

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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.

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What are non-UTF-8 characters? What is character encoding?

UTF-8 is one kind of character encoding. Character encoding refers to numerical representation of characters. Non-UTF-8 characters are the sequence of bytes in a data file that do not conform to UTF-8 encoding.

Origins of UTF-8:

Computers do not understand human alphabets or numbers. All they can understand is the bits (binary digits) 1 and 0. Right from Morse code (1840s) to Unicode, mankind had used several encodings, or methods to represent human readable alphabets and numbers to machine understandable form. Baudot code, Punch card data encoding, BCD, EBCDIC were popular until ASCII character encoding was introduced in 1963. The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is still a popularly accepted standard. Initially it was meant to be 7 characters with first character being reserved leaving 127 characters for use. But the popular standard is 8-bit ASCII that supported 256 combinations that fits into single byte. However, ASCII lacked provision for other characters like mathematical symbols and had no multi-lingual support. Several incompatible encoding schemes like e.g., ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 were widely used and are still around.

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