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ETorr
ETorr
Inspiring
August 12, 2017
Question

ALE & Batch List export files -- extra (null) characters embedded

  • August 12, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 770 views

ALE & Batch List export files -- extra (null) characters embedded

Was looking at ALE and Batch List exports from PPRo and noticed the file sizes were double what seemed necessary.

In other, a test ALE with 350 characters comes up 700bytes.

Taking a look at the file in a text editor revealed there is one extra character, null character (unicode 0000), per each actual character.

Easy enough to remove, and doing so halves the file size to the expected 350 bytes.

ALE's exported from Avid do not contain null strings.

Here's what the PPro-Exported ALE looks like in a text reader (BBEdit)

Character count: 700

File size: 700 bytes

Each of the upside-down question marks is, according to BBEDit, a null character...

Here's the expected output (after removing the nulls)

Character count: 350

File size: 350 bytes

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    1 reply

    Stan Jones
    Community Expert
    Stan JonesCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 12, 2017

    No extra characters for me. ALE of 2,268 bytes has 1,134 characters. So this is probably Unicode with 2 byte characters.

    I'm PC and using Notepad++ to read. If I turn on "show all characters," I see only tabs and line feeds in addition to the previous characters.

    And I can't confirm what encoding is being used. Hm.

    ETorr
    ETorrAuthor
    Inspiring
    August 13, 2017

    https://forums.adobe.com/people/Stan+Jones  wrote

    No extra characters for me. ALE of 2,268 bytes has 1,134 characters. So this is probably Unicode with 2 byte characters.

    I suspect you're right, though to the extend I understand any of this, the file is utf-8, which in my experience treats all characters below 128 as single-byte, anything above as 2-byte or whatever's necessary.

    Reason this matters:

    - An Avid-generated ALE with 1134 characters would be 1134 bytes (assuming all characters in the export are 128 and below) and no characters would be preceded by null chars (x00)

    - Software we develop and use to handle Avid-Generated ALEs trips over the PPro-generated ALEs.  Easy enough to deal with, but it seems worth pointing out that PPro is doing ALEs differently than Avid and that there are definitely circumstances where this issue matters.

    I'm aware of some people having problems with PPro-to-Avid ALEs.  (for instance AVID LOG EXCHANGE error in Media Composer )  Yet to be determined if there's a relationship

    I'm PC and using Notepad++ to read. If I turn on "show all characters," I see only tabs and line feeds in addition to the previous characters.

    I'm using BBEdit on Mac OS.  It's available on PC as well N/C.  Two other text editors.  Sublime and Apple's TextEdit don't display the nulls.  Under certain circumstances Adobe's own ExtendScript App does represent the nulls as spaces.

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