B4X Requires Chilkat v11.0.0+

Convert utf-8 Text File to Windows-1252

Demonstrates how to convert a text file using the utf-8 byte representation to windows-1252. B4X

Dim success As Boolean = False

'  Converts a file containing the following to windows-1252:

'  <greetings>
'      <message>Hello, world!</message>
'      <message>¡Hola, mundo!</message>
'      <message>Bonjour, le monde!</message>
'      <message>Hallo, Welt!</message>
'      <message>Olá, mundo!</message>
'      <message>Привет, мир!</message>
'      <message>你好，世界！</message>
'      <message>こんにちは、世界！</message>
'      <message>안녕하세요, 세계!</message>
'      <message>😊🌍</message>
'  </greetings>

'  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'  Note:
'  Windows-1252 is an 8-bit single-byte encoding. It can only encode:
'  
'      The basic ASCII set (0x00–0x7F).
'      Latin-1 Supplement (0xA0–0xFF), plus some extra printable characters (like curly quotes, €, etc.).
'      In total: 256 possible code points, covering most Western European languages but nothing outside of Latin script.

'  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'  Characters in your XML that are representable
'  
'      Hello, world! ✅ (ASCII only)
'      ¡Hola, mundo! ✅ (inverted exclamation mark U+00A1 is in Windows-1252)
'      Bonjour, le monde! ✅
'      Hallo, Welt! ✅
'      Olá, mundo! ✅ (U+00E1 á and U+00F3 ó are in Windows-1252)

'  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'  Characters that break conversion
'  
'      Russian / Cyrillic: Привет, мир!
'      → These are Cyrillic characters (U+041F … U+0440). Not representable in Windows-1252. Conversion would require replacement (e.g. with ? or XML character references).
'      Chinese: 你好，世界！
'      → CJK ideographs (U+4F60, U+597D, etc.). Not in Windows-1252.
'      Japanese: こんにちは、世界！
'      → Hiragana + CJK. Not in Windows-1252.
'      Korean: 안녕하세요, 세계!
'      → Hangul syllables. Not in Windows-1252.
'      Emoji: 😊🌍
'      → Unicode Supplementary Multilingual Plane (U+1F60A, U+1F30D). Windows-1252 cannot encode any emoji.

Dim bd As ChilkatBinData
bd.Initialize

'  Load the utf-8 bytes.
success = bd.LoadFile("qa_data/xml/utf8test.xml")
If success = False Then
    Log(bd.LastErrorText)
    Return
End If


'  If allOrNone = True, then the conversion fails and the contents of the BinData
'  are left unchanged if any char is unconvertable.

'  If allOrNone = False, then non-convertable chars are discarded.
Dim allOrNone As Boolean = False
Dim fromCharset As String = "utf-8"
Dim toCharset As String = "windows-1252"
success = bd.CharsetConvert(fromCharset, toCharset, allOrNone)

'  The return value will be False if any utf-8 chars were discarded because of non-convertability.
If success = False Then
    Log("Some utf-8 chars could not be converted to windows-1252")
Else
    Log("All utf-8 chars were converted to windows-1252")
End If


success = bd.WriteFile("c:/temp/qa_output/out.xml")

'  The output file contains the following, where all non-convertable chars were discarded

'  <greetings>
'      <message>Hello, world!</message>
'      <message>¡Hola, mundo!</message>
'      <message>Bonjour, le monde!</message>
'      <message>Hallo, Welt!</message>
'      <message>Olá, mundo!</message>
'      <message>, !</message>
'      <message></message>
'      <message></message>
'      <message>, !</message>
'      <message></message>
'  </greetings>