I have been banging my head on this problem for the past 2 weeks, until i finally decided to post something up here. Please read on.

Does anyone know what encoding being used on the exported work items in csv format?

when exporting work items from RTC in csv format. The file doesnt seem to be represented as comma separated values. instead the data is tab delimited and has double quotation marks surrounding every value. Can someone please explain this?

moreover for our purposes we are trying to automate the import process of the csv file into db2 for our daily defects report (which should be pretty straightforward) but we end up with data that is unreadable!!!!
for that reason we tried to use Perl for text manipulation to remove the double quotation marks and change the column delimiters to ^ or comma so that db2 would be able to handle.

In doing so we were still getting the same problem. Squares and Chinese characters being added everywhere whenever we try to run the Perl script on the csv file. After investigation i believe the problem is with the encoding of the exported file from RTC.

I am wondering if anyone ever came across such problem or has anything to share about the csv file? or knows the encoding of the file if any?