Visual Basic 6.0

Convert a Text File from utf-8 to Windows-1252

Convert a text file from one character encoding to another. Visual Basic 6.0

Dim success As Long
success = 0

' It's really simple:  Just load from one charset, save using another.

Dim sb As New ChilkatStringBuilder

' In this case, my test file has some norwegian chars in the utf-8 encoding
success = sb.LoadFile("qa_data/txt/norwegian_chars.txt","utf-8")

' We could just as well write over the file we just read in.
' (But I don't want to do that for my example..)
success = sb.WriteFile("qa_output/norwegian_chars.txt","windows-1252",0)

' Note:  Windows-1252 is a 1-byte per char encoding, which means it's only capable of representing
' those chars in Western European languages.   See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252
' 
' utf-8 is an encoding that can handle chars in any language, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, etc.
' If a text file contains chars in these other languages, obviously it cannot be converted to windows-1252 because
' there are only 256 chars that can possibly be represented in a 1-byte per char encoding.