PowerShell

Convert utf-8 Text File to Windows-1252

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

Add-Type -Path "C:\chilkat\ChilkatDotNet47-x64\ChilkatDotNet47.dll"

$success = $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.

$bd = New-Object Chilkat.BinData

# Load the utf-8 bytes.
$success = $bd.LoadFile("qa_data/xml/utf8test.xml")
if ($success -eq $false) {
    $($bd.LastErrorText)
    exit
}

# 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.
$allOrNone = $false
$fromCharset = "utf-8"
$toCharset = "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 -eq $false) {
    $("Some utf-8 chars could not be converted to windows-1252")
}
else {
    $("All utf-8 chars were converted to windows-1252")
}

$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>