Visual FoxPro

Convert utf-8 Text File to Windows-1252

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

LOCAL lnSuccess
LOCAL loBd
LOCAL lnAllOrNone
LOCAL lcFromCharset
LOCAL lcToCharset

lnSuccess = 0

* 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.

loBd = CreateObject('Chilkat.BinData')

* Load the utf-8 bytes.
lnSuccess = loBd.LoadFile("qa_data/xml/utf8test.xml")
IF (lnSuccess = 0) THEN
    ? loBd.LastErrorText
    RELEASE loBd
    CANCEL
ENDIF

* If allOrNone = 1, then the conversion fails and the contents of the BinData
* are left unchanged if any char is unconvertable.

* If allOrNone = 0, then non-convertable chars are discarded.
lnAllOrNone = 0
lcFromCharset = "utf-8"
lcToCharset = "windows-1252"
lnSuccess = loBd.CharsetConvert(lcFromCharset,lcToCharset,lnAllOrNone)

* The return value will be 0 if any utf-8 chars were discarded because of non-convertability.
IF (lnSuccess = 0) THEN
    ? "Some utf-8 chars could not be converted to windows-1252"
ELSE
    ? "All utf-8 chars were converted to windows-1252"
ENDIF

lnSuccess = loBd.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>

RELEASE loBd