(PowerBuilder) Convert utf-8 Text File to Windows-1252

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

Note: This example requires Chilkat v11.0.0 or greater.

Chilkat ActiveX Downloads ActiveX for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows

integer li_rc
integer li_Success
oleobject loo_Bd
integer li_AllOrNone
string ls_FromCharset
string ls_ToCharset

li_Success = 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.

loo_Bd = create oleobject
li_rc = loo_Bd.ConnectToNewObject("Chilkat.BinData")
if li_rc < 0 then
    destroy loo_Bd
    MessageBox("Error","Connecting to COM object failed")
    return
end if

// Load the utf-8 bytes.
li_Success = loo_Bd.LoadFile("qa_data/xml/utf8test.xml")
if li_Success = 0 then
    Write-Debug loo_Bd.LastErrorText
    destroy loo_Bd
    return
end if

// 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.
li_AllOrNone = 0
ls_FromCharset = "utf-8"
ls_ToCharset = "windows-1252"
li_Success = loo_Bd.CharsetConvert(ls_FromCharset,ls_ToCharset,li_AllOrNone)

// The return value will be 0 if any utf-8 chars were discarded because of non-convertability.
if li_Success = 0 then
    Write-Debug "Some utf-8 chars could not be converted to windows-1252"
else
    Write-Debug "All utf-8 chars were converted to windows-1252"
end if

li_Success = loo_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>


destroy loo_Bd