At my company, we upload bills of materials via Excel spreadsheets. However, we had an issue with a customer recently uploading a BOM that caused the created part list to display "Loading Failed" instead of showing the parts (when running in Internet Explorer with Browser mode set to IE9 compatibility). The problem coudl be fixed by pressing F12 and changing the Browser Mode to IE8 OR by switching to Chrome. However, these methods are not officially supported by my company.
We eventually determined that the cause of the problem was that the part number column in the Excel spreadsheet contained Part numbers with trailing non-breaking space characters. The Java method that extracted the data from the spreadsheet calls String.trim, but it can't remove this non-standard character. As a result, the part made it all the way into the system where it caused the problem.
I want to modify the code we have to extract the data from the BOM import to remove these "poisonous" characters. However, I need to know what characters Windchill CAN handle.
You can actually recreate this issue by manually entering the part with a non-breaking space at the end of the part name. If you are in IE9 with the Browser Mode setting to IE9 compatibility, it will cause the problem.
Here is the text viewed in Hex
