Are there any other illegal characters apart from ampersands?

Hi

I've been trying to create a set of POIs and finding out the hard way that POI Loader won't take POIs with ampersands (&) in them. (I tried searching for 'ampersand' on this forum but couldn't find any results, but I'm pretty sure this isn't a freak result - it definitely won't accept them). Are there any other illegal characters?

EDIT: I should have posted this in the Basecamp forum as I was trying to import Waypoints into Basecamp rather than use POI Loader. there doesn't seem to be any way to delete this post.

EDIT: Moved to BaseCamp forum
  • How are you importing waypoints with "&"? Assuming that you are using a GPX file, the issue isn't BaseCamp but the fact that & is a special character in XML and must be escaped. If you change any "&" to "&amp;", you should be able to import them fine. Any decent creator of GPX files should do that for you already. There are several special characters in XML; "<" and ">" come to mind.
  • Actually & and < are the only ones that must be escaped. Usually > and " are escaped too, but it's not strictly necessary.

    Using the correct encoding is also very important; the contents of gpx files, but also of csv files that you want to process with POI Loader has to be encoded as UTF-8. In Windows ANSI unaccented characters are the same as in UTF-8, but accented characters are different. Since most programs that are used to create csv files (like Excel) use Windows ANSI, this is a common problem in countries where accented characters are used.
  • Maybe this might help someone else:
    Tried to import POIs from Alpenrouten.de however they are encoding to ISO-8859 but POI loader (on Mac) needs UTF-8 to properly handle Umlauts. Simply use this command line on a Mac to fix the files (in case the original is ISO-8859 - use "file <filename>" to see the encoding)

    iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 < Hochpunkt.csv > Hochpunkt.utf8.csv
    iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 < Pass.csv > Pass.utf8.csv
    iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 < Tal.csv > Tal.utf8.csv
    iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 < Tunnel.csv > Tunnel.utf8.csv