Recently, while doing a banking implementation with a US bank, I run into an issue that never had before. It caught my attention and thought it was worth sharing it because it is quite specific that I am sure it is going to benefit someone.
I was doing payment files testing with a US Bank (a really big one) for my client's US and Canadian operations and because my client also operates in the province of Quebec, Canada (where we also speak French); we run into some particular issue because we have data with French accented characters.
It is really common in the French language to have accents on people's name, streets and companies too. But this bank's systems where not able to handle and read our files because of this "special characters / strange characters". Many times bank's systems are so antiquated that they are still running mainframe servers that were conceived in the 80's easily. Many of this servers and operating systems do not have the ability to handle some of this characters and even had a complete different code page too. In some of this cases, since we were passing them ASCII files (as per their request), their systems were not interpreting these characters and adding an extra space to the line record. This was making the record longer and therefore failing.
These are some of these "special characters" (Ex, À Á Ã È É Ê Ì Í Ò Ó Ô Ù Ú Û à á â è é ê ì í î ò ó ô ù ú û ).
Now there are 2 different scenarios that I had where I needed to remove this special characters, one without code and another one with.
# 1 - DME file creation (Ex. Electronic Payments, Positive Pay or any type of Banking file)
#2 - Check printing
# 1 - DME file creation
In this scenario we were creating 2 different types of files for this bank, an ASCII Positive Pay file and an XML ISO 20022 payment file. The ASCII one was the one that the bank was not able to process properly.
In order to remove the 'special characters' on the DME file, you just need to flag one option on the corresponding field and the DME engine will take care of the rest.
Ex. I want to remove the 'special characters' from the Vendor Name (PayeeName1 field in my DME) that is part of the output file.
Select the Field name (Element or Atom) and click on the "Conv.Function" icon. You will get a pop-up like this one (see below).
#2 - Check printing
I mentioned that the output file was related to Positive Pay, so in this case, we needed to have a exact match file vs. printed check otherwise the bank was going to reject our checks. So, we also needed to adjust our check forms so that the printed names do not have these accented characters either.
To do this, we will be using the exact same Function Module that is available in the DME engine, but in this case calling it via code.
FM SCP_REPLACE_STRANGE_CHARS
