Need code for removing all unicode characters in vb6 - unicode

I need code for removing all unicode characters in a vb6 string.

If this is UTF-16 text (as normal VB6 String values all are) and you can ignore the issue of surrogate pairs, then this is fairly quick and reasonably concise:
Private Sub DeleteNonAscii(ByRef Text As String)
Dim I As Long
Dim J As Long
Dim Char As String
I = 1
For J = 1 To Len(Text)
Char = Mid$(Text, J, 1)
If (AscW(Char) And &HFFFF&) <= &H7F& Then
Mid$(Text, I, 1) = Char
I = I + 1
End If
Next
Text = Left$(Text, I - 1)
End Sub
This has the workaround for the unfortunate choice VB6 had to make in returning a signed 16-bit integer from the AscW() function. It should have been a Long for symmatry with ChrW$() but it is what it is.
It should beat the pants off any regular expression library in clarity, maintainability, and performance. If better performance is required for truly massive amounts of text then SAFEARRAY or CopyMemory stunts could be used.

Public Shared Function StripUnicodeCharactersFromString(ByVal inputValue As String) As String
Return Regex.Replace(inputValue, "[^\u0000-\u007F]", String.Empty)
End Function
Vb6 - not sure will
sRTF = "\u" & CStr(AscW(char))
work? - You could do this for all char values above 127

StrConv is the command for converting strings.
StrConv Function
Returns a Variant (String) converted as specified.
Syntax
StrConv(string, conversion, LCID)
The StrConv function syntax has these named arguments:
Part Description
string Required. String expression to be converted.
conversion Required. Integer. The sum of values specifying the type of conversion to perform. `128` is Unicode to local code page (or whatever the optional LCID is)
LCID Optional. The LocaleID, if different than the system LocaleID. (The system LocaleID is the default.)

Related

How to convert String to UTF-8 to Integer in Swift

I'm trying to take each character (individual number, letter, or symbol) from a string file name without the extension and put each one into an array index as an integer of the utf-8 code (i.e. if the file name is "A1" without the extension, I would want "A" as an int "41" in first index, and "1" as int "31" in second index)
Here is the code I have but I'm getting this error "No exact matches in call to instance method 'append'", my guess is because .utf8 still keeps it as a string type:
for i in allNoteFiles {
var CharacterArray : [Int] = []
for character in i {
var utf8Character = String(character).utf8
CharacterArray.append(utf8Character) //error is here
}
....`//more code down here within the for in loop using CharacterArray indexes`
I'm sure the answer is probably simple, but I'm very new to Swift.
I've tried appending var number instead with:
var number = Int(utf8Character)
and
var number = (utf8Character).IntegerValue
but I get errors "No exact matches in call to initializer" and "Value of type 'String.UTF8View' has no member 'IntegerValue'"
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
The reason
var utf8Character = String(character).utf8
CharacterArray.append(utf8Character)
doesn't work for you is because utf8Character is not a single integer, but a UTF8View: a lightweight way to iterate over the UTF-8 codepoints in a string. Every Character in a String can be made up of any number of UTF-8 bytes (individual integers) — while ASCII characters like "A" and "1" map to a single UTF-8 byte, the vast majority of characters do not: every UTF-8 code point maps to between 1 and 4 individual bytes. The Encoding section of UTF-8 on Wikipedia has a few very illustrative examples of how this works.
Now, assuming that you do want to split a string into individual UTF-8 bytes (either because you can guarantee your original string is ASCII-only, so the assumption that "character = byte" holds, or because you actually care about the bytes [though this is rarely the case]), there's a short and idiomatic solution to what you're looking for.
String.UTF8View is a Sequence of UInt8 values (individual bytes), and as such, you can use the Array initializer which takes a Sequence:
let characterArray: [UInt8] = Array(i.utf8)
If you need an array of Int values instead of UInt8, you can map the individual bytes ahead of time:
let characterArray: [Int] = Array(i.utf8.lazy.map { Int($0) })
(The .lazy avoids creating and storing an array of values in the middle of the operation.)
However, do note that if you aren't careful (e.g., your original string is not ASCII), you're bound to get very unexpected results from this operation, so keep that in mind.

How character expansions does work under the hood?

I am reading the CLR VIA C# by Jeffrey Richter. And while explaining string comparison, he notes that:
When the Compare method is not performing an ordinal comparison, it
performs character expansions. A character expansion is when a
character is expanded to multiple characters regardless of culture.
String s1 = "Strasse";
String s2 = "Straße";
Boolean eq;
CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo("de-­DE");
eq = String.Compare(s1, s2, true, ci) == 0; // returns true
For the above case, he notes:
...the German Eszet character ‘ß’ is always expanded to
‘ss. So in the code example, the call to Compare will always
return 0 regardless of which culture I actually pass in to it.
I want to know from which source, the runtime takes that ß is equal to ss or how it calculates it?

Strange results when deleting all special characters from a string in Progress / OpenEdge

I have the code snippet below (as suggested in this previous Stack Overflow answer ... Deleting all special characters from a string in progress 4GL) which is attempting to remove all extended characters from a string so that I may transmit it to a customer's system which will not accept any extended characters.
do v-int = 128 to 255:
assign v-string = replace(v-string,chr(v-int),"").
end.
It is working perfectly with one exception (which makes me fear there may be others I have not caught). When it gets to 255, it will replace all 'y's in the string.
If I do the following ...
display chr(255) = chr(121). /* 121 is asc code of y */
I get true as the result.
And therefore, if I do the following ...
display replace("This is really strange",chr(255),"").
I get the following result:
This is reall strange
I have verified that 'y' is the only character affected by running the following:
def var v-string as char init "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz".
def var v-int as int.
do v-int = 128 to 255:
assign v-string = replace(v-string,chr(v-int),"").
end.
display v-string.
Which results in the following:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxz
I know I can fix this by removing 255 from the range but I would like to understand why this is happening.
Is this a character collation set issue or am I missing something simpler?
Thanks for any help!
This is a bug. Here's a Progress Knowledge Base article about it:
http://knowledgebase.progress.com/articles/Article/000046181
The workaround is to specify the codepage in the CHR() statement, like this:
CHR(255, "UTF-8", "1252")
Here it is in your example:
def var v-string as char init "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz". def var v-int as int.
do v-int = 128 to 255:
assign v-string = replace(v-string, chr(v-int, "UTF-8", "1252"), "").
end.
display v-string.
You should now see the 'y' in the output.
This seems to be a bug!
The REPLACE() function returns an unexpected result when replacing character CHR(255) (ÿ) in a String.
The REPLACE() function modifies the value of the target character, but additionally it changes any occurrence of characters 'Y' and 'y' present in the String.
This behavior seems to affect only the character ÿ. Other characters are correctly changed by REPLACE().
Using default codepage ISO-8859-1
Link to knowledgebase

Matching Unicode punctuation using LPeg

I am trying to create an LPeg pattern that would match any Unicode punctuation inside UTF-8 encoded input. I came up with the following marriage of Selene Unicode and LPeg:
local unicode = require("unicode")
local lpeg = require("lpeg")
local punctuation = lpeg.Cmt(lpeg.Cs(any * any^-3), function(s,i,a)
local match = unicode.utf8.match(a, "^%p")
if match == nil
return false
else
return i+#match
end
end)
This appears to work, but it will miss punctuation characters that are a combination of several Unicode codepoints (if such characters exist), as I am reading only 4 bytes ahead, it probably kills the performance of the parser, and it is undefined what the library match function will do, when I feed it a string that contains a runt UTF-8 character (although it appears to work now).
I would like to know whether this is a correct approach or if there is a better way to achieve what I am trying to achieve.
The correct way to match UTF-8 characters is shown in an example in the LPeg homepage. The first byte of a UTF-8 character determines how many more bytes are a part of it:
local cont = lpeg.R("\128\191") -- continuation byte
local utf8 = lpeg.R("\0\127")
+ lpeg.R("\194\223") * cont
+ lpeg.R("\224\239") * cont * cont
+ lpeg.R("\240\244") * cont * cont * cont
Building on this utf8 pattern we can use lpeg.Cmt and the Selene Unicode match function kind of like you proposed:
local punctuation = lpeg.Cmt(lpeg.C(utf8), function (s, i, c)
if unicode.utf8.match(c, "%p") then
return i
end
end)
Note that we return i, this is in accordance with what Cmt expects:
The given function gets as arguments the entire subject, the current position (after the match of patt), plus any capture values produced by patt. The first value returned by function defines how the match happens. If the call returns a number, the match succeeds and the returned number becomes the new current position.
This means we should return the same number the function receives, that is the position immediately after the UTF-8 character.

How to convert Unicode characters to escape codes

So, I have a bunch of strings like this: {\b\cf12 よろてそ } . I'm thinking I could iterate over each character and replace any unicode (Edit: Anything where AscW(char) > 127 or < 0) with a unicode escape code (\u###). However, I'm not sure how to programmatically do so. Any suggestions?
Clarification:
I have a string like {\b\cf12 よろてそ } and I want a string like {\b\cf12 [STUFF]}, where [STUFF] will display as よろてそ when I view the rtf text.
You can simply use the AscW() function to get the correct value:-
sRTF = "\u" & CStr(AscW(char))
Note unlike other escapes for unicode, RTF uses the decimal signed short int (2 bytes) representation for a unicode character. Which makes the conversion in VB6 really quite easy.
Edit
As MarkJ points out in a comment you would only do this for characters outside of 0-127 but then you would also need to give some other characters inside the 0-127 range special handling as well.
Another more roundabout way, would be to add the MSScript.OCX to the project and interface with VBScript's Escape function. For example
Sub main()
Dim s As String
s = ChrW$(&H3088) & ChrW$(&H308D) & ChrW$(&H3066) & ChrW$(&H305D)
Debug.Print MyEscape(s)
End Sub
Function MyEscape(s As String) As String
Dim scr As Object
Set scr = CreateObject("MSScriptControl.ScriptControl")
scr.Language = "VBScript"
scr.Reset
MyEscape = scr.eval("escape(" & dq(s) & ")")
End Function
Function dq(s)
dq = Chr$(34) & s & Chr$(34)
End Function
The Main routine passes in the original Japanese characters and the debug output says:
%u3088%u308D%u3066%u305D
HTH