This topic explains how Trillium handles certain special characters when it imports data into a repository.
Unprintable Characters
Unprintable characters are control characters such as new lines, carriage returns,
tabs, or binary zeros. Unprintable characters are not removed from the end of pure
space values or values. They are displayed as the symbol 
in Trillium. To find out the true value of
these unprintable characters you will need to follow the steps below.
To find the actual value of an unprintable character ()
- In the Navigation View, right-click the attribute containing the unprintable characters and select Drill down to Metadata. The Entity Member Attribute List View for the selected attribute opens.
- Double-click Values.
- Locate the value.
- Right-click the value and select Detail Value. The character, hexadecimal, and decimal values are displayed for each character in that value.
Spaces
For data imported through a loader connection with a type of COBO L or TSQ, space characters are removed from the end of all values. For values that contain only space values, the value held in Trillium is always just one space character, with metadata tags to show the original shortest and longest space value for the entire attribute.
Spaces are represented in Trillium as blank values.
To find the actual value of a space
- In the Navigation View, right-click the attribute containing the space value and select Drill down to Metadata. The Entity Member Attribute List View for the selected attribute opens.
- Double-click Values.
- Locate the value.
- Right-click the value and select Detail Value. The character, hexadecimal, and decimal values are displayed for each character in that value.
Nulls
A null is the absence of a value. In delimited files, a null can occur where two delimiters follow each other with no data in between. For example, in the data fields customerx,,housenumber, the middle value is considered null. In RDBMS applications, nulls can be found in attributes that allow nulls. In COBOL, LOW VALUES are nulls.