As of version 2023.f, the character set to be used when exporting the bill of quantities in the standard FIEBDC-3 format (.bc3) can be selected from the "Bill of quantities" tab in the applications that have it. For this purpose, the "Character set" field has been included in the export configuration window and has three options:
- Automatic selection
The ANSI character set shall be used whenever possible. If the application detects characters that are not compatible with ANSI encoding, the UTF-8 character set shall be used. - ANSI
This is the character set defined for Windows and the default character set used in previous versions. Not all Unicode characters can be represented by this encoding format. - UTF-8
Through this standard encoding format (RFC 3629) all Unicode characters can be represented. However, the current FIEBDC-3 standard specification (3/2020) does not support UFT-8 encoding, so the ANSI character set should be used where possible (Automatic selection).
Thanks to the possibility of exporting and importing the bill of quantities in UTF-8 encoding, applications can now share bills of quantities that include Unicode characters. This establishes a fully multilingual environment for managing the project’s bills of quantities.
In the FIEBDC-3 standard, the character set is specified in the CHARACTER_SET field of the V record.
