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Xojo Plugin 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.

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Xojo Plugin
Dim success As Boolean
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.

Dim bd As New Chilkat.BinData

//  Load the utf-8 bytes.
success = bd.LoadFile("qa_data/xml/utf8test.xml")
If (success = False) Then
    System.DebugLog(bd.LastErrorText)
    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.
Dim allOrNone As Boolean
allOrNone = False
Dim fromCharset As String
fromCharset = "utf-8"
Dim toCharset As String
toCharset = "windows-1252"
success = bd.CharsetConvert(fromCharset,toCharset,allOrNone)

//  The return value will be 0 if any utf-8 chars were discarded because of non-convertability.
If (success = False) Then
    System.DebugLog("Some utf-8 chars could not be converted to windows-1252")
Else
    System.DebugLog("All utf-8 chars were converted to windows-1252")
End If

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>