Lua 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. Lua

local chilkat = require("chilkat")

-- 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.

local bd = chilkat.BinData.new()

-- Load the utf-8 bytes.
local success = bd:load_file("qa_data/xml/utf8test.xml")
if not success then
    print(bd.last_error_text)
    return
end

-- 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.
local allOrNone = false
local fromCharset = "utf-8"
local toCharset = "windows-1252"
success = bd:charset_convert(fromCharset, toCharset, allOrNone)

-- The return value will be false if any utf-8 chars were discarded because of non-convertability.
if not success then
    print("Some utf-8 chars could not be converted to windows-1252")
else
    print("All utf-8 chars were converted to windows-1252")
end

success = bd:write_file("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>