Xbase++ 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. Xbase++

LOCAL nSuccess
LOCAL oBd
LOCAL nAllOrNone
LOCAL cFromCharset
LOCAL cToCharset

nSuccess := 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.

oBd := CreateObject("Chilkat.BinData")

//  Load the utf-8 bytes.
nSuccess := oBd:LoadFile("qa_data/xml/utf8test.xml")
IF (nSuccess == 0)
    ? oBd:LastErrorText
    oBd:destroy()
    RETURN
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.
nAllOrNone := 0
cFromCharset := "utf-8"
cToCharset := "windows-1252"
nSuccess := oBd:CharsetConvert(cFromCharset, cToCharset, nAllOrNone)

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

nSuccess := oBd: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>

oBd:destroy()