Dark Theme

 O boy, o boy, o boy...

Its been sooo long since last time I published something on my blog. The era of social networks arrived and this place took one for the team.

Luckily, the time has come that all those social networks transitioned into something similar to news portals and marketing platforms, content creators disappeared and became lurkers, so i finally remembered that this platform exists.

Lets hope that this is a new start, and what could be a better way to heat things up a little than to change the blog theme. Of course, the dark one. 

Import shapefiles into SQL Server

Import shape file to SQL Server

Here's a little tool for you that I've been using quite often lately. It can be used used to import Esri shapefiles into Microsoft SQL Server (2008 and 2012) while taking into account character encoding of the input data. The geospatial information is stored as SqlGeometry.

Nice thing about it is that it allows you to rename/remap destination table column names, choose the destination table name, and set the primary key for the table. And yeah, it has a user interface :)

The app is rather simple so I don't think that further explanation about its usage is needed. If it turns out that I've been wrong, don't hesitate to leave a comment.

I would  like to point out one thing though. If you are not sure which encoding codepage to use, check this link and look it up. The codepage default is 65001, which is the code page for UTF-8 encoding.

If you have any suggestions about improving the tool, or find a bug or something, leave a comment, I will be glad to update it.

Download exe from my Google Drive

EDIT: As there is some interest in this small app, and various different exceptions are thrown for different users, i am providing you with the source code so that you can see what is actually the problem. I was too lazy to catch every exception in the original program and were always returning the same message when the error occurs. 

The source code is hosted on GitHub, so that you can pull it or download as Zip.
If you update the code, please take time to push your changes back and help me update this small tool.

Download source code from GitHub

UTF-8 to UTF-16 (Unicode) File Converter

I've recently had a problem with importing UTF-8 CSV file into the MSSQL 2012 db using bulk insert, as MSSQL, in fact, does not support UTF-8. 

The solution was simple, I needed to decode and re-encode the file using UTF-16 prior running the bulk insert command.
In order to optimize the conversion process, the conversion buffer size can be changed.

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/// <summary> /// Converts UTF-8 encoded file to UTF-16 (Unicode) /// </summary> /// <param name="utf8FilePath">Path to the input file (UTF-8 encoded)</param> /// <param name="unicodeFilePath">Path to the output file (UTF-16 encoded)</param> /// <param name="bufferSize">Size of the buffer in Kb</param> public static void ConvertUtfToUnicode(String utf8FilePath, String unicodeFilePath, int bufferSize) { FileStream fs = new FileStream(utf8FilePath, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.None, 1, true); FileStream fs_out = new FileStream(unicodeFilePath, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.None,1,true); int total = (int)fs.Length; int cBytesOut = 0, cBytesIn = 0, cExtraBytes = 0, cLength = 0; int piece = bufferSize * 1024; byte[] bytes_in = new byte[piece+3]; byte[] bytes_out = null; do { cLength = fs.Read(bytes_in, cExtraBytes, piece) + cExtraBytes; cExtraBytes = cntExtraBytes(bytes_in[cLength - 3], bytes_in[cLength - 2], bytes_in[cLength - 1]); bytes_out = Encoding.Convert(Encoding.UTF8, Encoding.Unicode, bytes_in, 0, cLength - cExtraBytes); if (cExtraBytes > 0) { Buffer.BlockCopy(bytes_in, cLength - cExtraBytes, bytes_in, 0, cExtraBytes); } fs_out.Write(bytes_out, 0, bytes_out.Count()); cBytesOut += bytes_out.Count(); cBytesIn += piece; } while (total > cBytesIn); fs.Close(); fs_out.Close(); } // UTF-8 is encoded in up to 4 bytes, need to make sure we don't chop a sequence in half // 240+: First in a 4 byte sequence // 224+: 3 byte sequence // 194+: 2 byte sequence // 128+: Part of a multi-byte sequence // 128-: Not part of a multi-byte sequence private static int cntExtraBytes(byte c3, byte c2, byte c1) { if (c1 < 128) return 0; if (c1 >= 192) return 1; if (c2 >= 224) return 2; if (c2 >= 192) return 0; if (c3 >= 240) return 3; if (c3 >= 224) return 0; return 0; }

btw, how do you like my code beautifier? :) you can make you code beautiful too, just navigate to http://hilite.me/