I try to use Google Analytics for my website and have a problem, that is in Cyrillic naming for the EventCategory (like on the image below). Here is described that for EventCategory the only restriction is Max Length, that is equal to 150 bytes. But I use Cyrillic names with the length at most 17 symbols (that for UTF-8 will be 34 bytes), for example: Добавиться в друзья. What is the reason of cutting names and how to prevent it for Cyrillic?
I solved the problem. In Google Analytics, the parameters in event formed by using URL encoding. Thus, one Cyrillic symbol encoded by 6 URL symbols. The solution: use standard latin alphabet.
Related
I am trying to read string data from txt file which has special turkish characters in it.
I want to store content in a string. I tried some methods like textscan , fileread but, instead of special turkish characters like ş,ç,ı,ö,ğ, there are some weird symbols. Are there any way to do that?
I created a file called turkish.txt with the characters you mentioned (ş,ç,ı,ö,ğ). Trying to read it gave me the following:
fid = fopen('turkish.txt','r','n','UTF-8');
str=fread(fid);
native2unicode(str')
ans =
ÿþ_, ç , 1, ö ,
As you can see, ş,ı,ğ are not rendered correctly. If you type
help slCharacterEncoding
You can see a list of most commonly supported encodings by platforms. I played with the encodings a little, some which I have checked were:
ISO-8891-1
US-ASCII
Windows-1252
Shift_JIS
The last one is related to japanese characters. They contain some of the turkish characters, which were rendered correctly such as ç and ö, but not all of them.
If you skim through the docs it says:
If you want to use a different character encoding, you need to start MATLAB with the appropriate locale settings for your operating system. Consult your operating system manual to change the locale setting.
The instructions for setting the locale on windows platforms, which I haven't tried, can be found here.
Hope it helps.
As part of optimizing a web development project, we need to strip out unnecessary characters that are never going to be used to reduce the size of font files. I have searched Google and found nothing canonical on the subject of which characters are required and which are safe to remove.
I've found the following ranges that may be of interest:
0020 — 007F Basic Latin
00A0 — 00FF Latin-1 Supplement
0100 — 017F Latin Extended-A
0180 — 024F Latin Extended-B
0250 — 02AF IPA Extensions
02B0 — 02FF Spacing Modifier Letters
0300 — 036F Combining Diacritical Marks
27C0 — 27EF Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A
It seems that the most aggressive approach would be to only keep "Basic Latin", 0020 — 007F, which provides upper and lower-case letters, numbers and a few basic symbols, like the $, +, (, ), etc.
Latin-1 Supplement contains some extra goodies like Trademark and Copyright symbols and fractions.
Latin Extended-A and -B contain letters with accent marks, and since our copy is in English, I'm not sure if these will ever be needed.
If we use only that ranges (0020 — 007F) and (00A0 — 00FF), will we run into problems down the line with missing characters, should some user decide to post a comment in Spanish (for example)? Or will the browser fall back to a default font for characters that aren't included the web font?
The point of a web-font is to make the main bodies of text and headlines look pretty, which the basic latin set should cover, but I don't know if there are hidden "gotchas" with stripping down to just the "Basic Latin" range, like accented characters showing as diamond question marks instead of falling back to a system font, etc.
What range of unicode characters should be kept in a #font-face web
font for a US based website with a US audience? Are there any best practices or guidelines for striping unnecessary characters from a font for web use?
I would recommend subsetting to one of the common "code page" definitions that support US/Western Europe. Most code page definitions pre-date Unicode and typically have the bits and pieces needed for various regional support without including entire Unicode blocks. Suggestions:
Windows Code Page 1252
ISO/IEC 8859-1 "Latin 1"*
ISO/IEC 8859-15
*This is the same as Unicode Ranges 0020-007F Basic Latin + 00A0-00FF Latin-1 Supplement
These include much more than is strictly required for US English, though as noted above, several accented characters commonly appear in English text (é, ñ, as well as other punctuation marks and symbols). These sets include those characters, so you should be in good shape for the vast majority of text for a U.S. audience. Note also that in most fonts, these characters are typically "composites", which means that they use a reference to the components (e.g. 'é' is built from references to 'e' and '´'); as such, they don't normally require as much size to store them, so retaining them usually won't incur a major size penalty.
If you might encounter European financial text, I'd suggest either Windows 1252 or ISO/IEC 8859-15 which include the Euro currency symbol.
I don't know if there are hidden "gotchas" with stripping down to just the "Basic Latin" range, like accented characters showing as diamond question marks instead of falling back to a system font
Any characters that don't exist in the font you are using will fall back to any default font the browser can find with the characters in. This will likely be ugly when interleaved with other characters from your custom font, but modern OSes provide decent font coverage for commonly-used characters from the above blocks so typically it will still be readable.
So you should include characters based on whether you think they'll be used commonly enough that having them rendered in an ugly font is a deal-breaker. For what it's worth, a pretty minimal set I have used before for a similar purpose is ¡£°±²³¿ÉËÑéëñ‘’“”–—•€™, but your site's exactly requirements may vary. (For example, if you coöpted the New-Yorker-style diaeresis you would certainly want äëïöü.)
(How exactly default fallback fonts work varies between browsers and was famously troublesome in older versions of IE, and IE Mobile. But the basic accented Latin letters are pretty safe.)
I am importing .txt file from a remote server and saving it to a database. I use a .Net script for this purpose. I sometimes notice a garbled word/characters (Ullerهkersvنgen) inside the files, which makes a problem while saving to the database.
I want to filter all such characters and convert them to unicode before saving to the database.
Note: I have been through many similar posts but had no luck.
Your help in this context will be highly appreciated.
Thanks.
Assuming your script does know the correct encoding of your text snippet than that should be the regular expression to find all Non-ASCII charactres:
[^\x00-\x7F]+
see here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/20890052/1144966 and https://stackoverflow.com/a/8845398/1144966
Also, the base-R tools package provides two functions to detect non-ASCII characters:
tools::showNonASCII()
tools::showNonASCIIfile()
You need to know or at least guess the character encoding of the data in order to be able to convert it properly. So you should try and find information about the origin and format of the text file and make sure that you read the file properly in your software.
For example, “Ullerهkersvنgen” looks like a Scandinavian name, with Scandinavian letters in it, misinterpreted according to a wrong character encoding assumption or as munged by an incorrect character code conversion. The first Arabic letter in it, “ه”, is U+0647 ARABIC LETTER HEH. In the ISO-8859-6 encoding, it is E7 (hex.); in windows-1256, it is E5. Since Scandinavian text are normally represented in ISO-8859-1 or windows-1252 (when Unicode encodings are not used), it is natural to check what E7 and E5 mean in them: “ç” and “å”. For linguistic reasons, the latter is much more probable here. The second Arabic letter is “ن” U+0646 ARABIC LETTER NOON, which is E4 in windows-1256. And in ISO-8859-1, E4 is “ä”. This makes perfect sense: the word is “Ulleråkersvägen”, a real Swedish street name (in Uppsala, at least).
Thus, the data is probably ISO-8859-1 or windows-1252 (Windows Latin 1) encoded text, incorrectly interpreted as windows-1256 (Windows Arabic). No conversion is needed; you just need to read the data as windows-1252 encoded. (After reading, it can of course be converted to another encoding.)
I copied large amount of text from another system to my PC. When I viewed the text in my PC, it looked weird. So I copied all the fonts from the other PC and installed them in mine too. Now the text looks okay, but actually it seems that is not in Unicode. For example, if I copy the text and paste in another UTF-8 supported editor such as Notepad++, I get English characters ("bgah;") only like shown below.
How to convert this whole text into unicode text, like the one below. So I can copy the text and paste anywhere else.
பெயர்
The above text was manually obtained using http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic/Tamil
I need this conversion to be done, so I can copy them into database tables.
'Ja-01' is a font with a custom 'visual encoding'.
That is to say, the sequence of characters really is "bgah;" and it only looks like Tamil to you because the font's shapes for the Latin characters bg look like பெ.
This is always to be avoided, because by storing the content as "bgah;" you lose the ability to search and process it as real Tamil, but this approach was common in the pre-Unicode days especially for less-widespread scripts without mature encoding standards. This application probably predates widespread use of TSCII.
Because it is a custom encoding not shared by any other font, it is very unlikely you will be able to find a tool to convert content in this encoding to proper Unicode characters. It does not appear to be any standard character ordering, so you will have to look at the font (eg in charmap.exe) and note down every character, find the matching character in Unicode and map between them.
For example here's a trivial Python script to replace characters in a file:
mapping= {
u'a': u'\u0BAF', # Tamil letter Ya
u'b': u'\u0BAA', # Tamil letter Pa
u'g': u'\u0BC6', # Tamil vowel sign E (combining)
u'h': u'\u0BB0', # Tamil letter Ra
u';': u'\u0BCD', # Tamil sign virama (combining)
# fill in the rest of the mapping information here!
}
with open('ja01data.txt', 'rb') as fp:
data= fp.read().decode('utf-8')
for char in mapping:
data= data.replace(char, mapping[char])
with open('utf8data.txt', 'wb') as fp:
fp.write(data.encode('utf-8'))
The font you found is getting you into trouble. The actual cell text is "bgah;", it gets rendered to பெயர் because you found a font that can work with 8-bit non-Unicode characters. So reading it or pasting it into Notepad++ is going to produce "bgah;" since that's the real text. It can only ever be rendered properly again by forcing the program that displays the string to use that same font.
Ditch the font and enter Unicode so it looks like this:
"bgah" looks like a Baamini based system, which is pre-unicode. It was popular in Canada (and the SL Tamil diaspora in general) in the 90s.
As the others mentioned, it looks like a custom visual encoding that mimics the performance of a foreign script while maintaining ASCII encoding.
Google "Baamini to unicode convertor". The University of Colombo seems to have put one up: http://www.ucsc.cmb.ac.lk/ltrl/services/feconverter/?maps=t_b-u.xml
Let me know if this works. If not, I can ask around and get something for you.
You could first check whether the encoding is TSCII, as this sounds most probable. It is an 8-bit encoding, and the fonts you copied are probably based on that encoding. Check out whether the TSCII to UTF-8 converter at SourceForge is suitable. The project there is called “Any Tamil Encoding to Unicode” but they say that only TSCII is supported for now.
Before anyone recommends that I do a google search on this, I have. I just need a bit more clarity around what codepages and encodings.
If I use UTF8 encoding, and use an italian code page and then a french code page, does this mean ill get different characters even though the bytes havent changed?
Joel has a nice summary of this:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
And no. if I understand your question correctly it doesn't mean that.
When you're converting UTF-8 to a specific code page, it is possible that only some of the characters are going to be converted. What happens to the ones that don't get converted depends on how you call the conversion. A possible result is that the characters which could not be mapped to the code page would be converted to question mark characters.
An encoding is simply a mapping between numerical values and "characters".
US-ASCII maps the number 65 to the letter A, 32 to a space and 49 to the digit "1". (How these things are rendered is another matter.) In fact, UTF-8 does the same! But there are other values which UTF-8 treats differently to ASCII. It is a variable-length encoding, i.e. a character may be encoded with 1, 2, 3, or 4 bytes; common characters generally consume less bytes.
Plain text files, including web pages, are stored and transmitted as sequences of bytes. These bytes are supposed to represent something textual. Software applications (like text editors and web browsers) are responsible for rending the information within these files on the screen. Usually they make use of library or OS functions.
If the software assumes a different encoding to the software that created the file, the wrong characters may be displayed!
Note that it is possible to convert between different encodings; however if you convert to an encoding that does not contain a certain character, the software must make a choice as to what to use instead. This conversion often happens transparently (when you save a file with a certain encoding, whatever you've typed must be changed into that encoding).
UTF-8 includes all characters from your French and Italian code page, but the language specific code pages does not include all of each others characters.
So you can take input from each language and convert it to UTF-8 for storage, but you can not be certain that you will get the right characters if you take Italian input and show it as French.
Use UTF-8 all the way if you can.