DAE file with Czech Characters Does Not Import Into SketchUp (English)

Technical Problems SketchUp
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Using SketchUp Pro 2014 on a PC (and SU Pro 2017 for testing).

I’ve received a DAE file from a Czech customer.

If the material information in that DAE includes Czech characters then it cannot be imported in SketchUp, a message appears ‘Failed to import’.

If I edit the DAE file in a text editor and remove or replace the Czech characters then it will import just fine.

  • Is SketchUp (English) able to import DAE files with Czech Characters?
  • Is there a Czech language version of SketchUp (and should that be used to import the DAE file from Czech clients?

Thanks in advance.

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All editions are here: https://www.sketchup.com/download/all
(No Czech edition yet.)

Are these are unicode characters ?

SketchUp 2014 and higher uses Ruby 2.x which has unicode support for Windows. So I am surprised at this bug.

There are some known issues with special language encodings such as Vietnamese which uses multiple diacritical marks on characters. Is Czech similar ?

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SketchUp says it is proud of having an industry-leading Collada support. So this issue is surprising (but not impossible).

Since the Collada standard is based on XML, it explicitely allows any unicode characters (correctly encoded in XML). Possibly the XML/Collada library (dll, not Ruby) that SketchUp uses does not fully comply with the specification. SketchUp uses Collada DOM and their developers seem not to give a high priority to unicode.

If it doesn’t work in one language version I don’t think it works differently in another one.

Do you have an example file that you can share? Or show some excerpts from a file showing the XML header (first line with encoding information) and a string with unicode?

1 Like
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Thanks Aerilius, I’ve attached a zip file with the images folder along with the DAE file.

files.zip (75.4 KB)

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Thanks for the reply Dan, I missed it before.

Ok, I checked there too but wanted to be sure.

I’m not sure how to tell if the characters are unicode, can the file attached in my previous post be used to confirm?

I actually received the file from a client so I have no idea, however your phrase ‘multiple diacritical marks on characters’ gave me something to perform a web search but it appears that the Czech language does not include multiple diacritical marks on characters.

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I think Aerilius may be closer to the truth, and that this may be a 3rd party library issue.

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It looks like an encoding mismatch. When my text editor attempts to read the file with auto-detected encoding, it displays an error. Special characters like í exist not in all encodings, and in some they are in different places.

The COLLADA header says it is saved as UTF-8 (which is nowadays “the” standard), but the file is actually encoded as Western European, possibly Windows-1252 or ISO 8859-1(5).

When I open the file as ISO 8859, then save as UTF-8, SketchUp can import it successfully.

Assuming you use Windows, an easy way for you to change the encoding is probably using Notepad++: How to convert csv files encoding to utf-8 | Odoo

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UTF-8 or UTF-16 are the default (when unspecified,) and a bit order mark at the beginning of the file would indicate UTF-16 (no, BOM would be UTF-8.)

<?xml version="1.0"?>

… OR specifically denote UTF-8:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

All other encodings should be correctly specified, ie:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

REF: XML Declaration [XML Standards] | Microsoft Learn

So, would editing the file with the correct encoding, also work for SketchUp import ?

1 Like
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Yes, with the edited XML header the ISO-8859-1 file can also be imported into SketchUp.

1 Like
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Okay, so what is the application that incorrectly created the DAE file ?

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Very interesting, I edited the DAE file and replaced the header:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

With this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

… and it imported with no issues.

Since it seems that the DAE is generated as Western European, possibly Windows-1252 or ISO 8859-1(5) would it be recommended to replace the Header to match that? IE: as in my test: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

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Yea, give Aerilius the solution check. He earned it.

But the question remains …

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Hi Dan, the file was sent to me by a person using a software called Cabinet
Vision Solid.

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