Special Characters in European Addresses

We are planning to use MapPoint Online to geocode addresses in many countries. For the US, UK and Canada we are finding success. For countries such as Germany, Finland and Denmark we are seeing instances where MapPoint does not recognize special characters. Ex. for Germany:

The street called Afragäßchen in the town of Augsburg
receives a geocoding result of 'Bad'

while a modification to the street to make it
Afragässchen results in a successful geocode

Does MapPoint Online have country specific add-ons that we have not installed? Are there wholesale means of handling these special characters so that MapPoint Online can correctly interpret them?

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

There is not an add-in or program to standardize the addresses that I am aware of although you might check out the software of companies like Melissadata.com that have a lot of list management and cleaning software.

How many special characters are there? I think I would recommend to learn by trial and error which characters need to be replaced and then just run a search/replace on your data beforehand.

It seems like Microsoft's geocoding engine should recognize the special characters :-/ you might try contacting them and see if they know about the issue and if/when they plan to address it... they are actively developing the MapPoint Web Service and Virtual Earth.

Eric

Thanks Eric.

We are dealing with about >100K addresses across 10 countries so there may be many special characters to deal with. That's why I was hoping we just hadn't installed the 'interpreters'.

Looks like it's grunt work for now to identify, find and replace. I'll also check with Microsoft on some of the specific examples.

Paul

Just make sure you use encoding.UTF8 when you create a stream to read the addresses. It should work