Displaying Chinese characters on a form from an INI File - encoding

My plugin reads the control caption text from an INI file (ANSI as UTF-8 encoding) in order to display multiple languages. Key point being it is a plugin, I have no control nor ability to change this INI file format or file type.
They are currently being read into my plugin with TINIFile.ReadString and stored as a string. I can modify this (data type, read method, etc) as needed.
The main application reads from its own application language files that are UCS-2 Little Endian encoded as a TXT file. These display fine when the language is changed, even when the Windows OS is kept in English (in other words no OS locale changes need to be made for the application to switch display languages).
My plugin's form cannot display Asian characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc). English language is fine.
I have tried various fonts, using various combinations of AnsiString, String, etc. What am I missing to be able to display Asian characters on the form? I have not found a similar question to what I'm trying to do specifically with how my language text is being read into the plugin.

If the .INI file reader does not interpret the contents of the values, and allows all values through transparently, then you need to map the strings into one with the correct locale.
There is a similar question at Delphi 2010: how do I convert a UTF8-encoded PAnsiChar to a UnicodeString? that explains how to do the conversion. You may need to extract the contents into a RawByteString to avoid the implicit conversions.

Related

Does Apache Tika do character set conversion?

I'm using org.apache.tika.Tika.parseToString() to convert documents into plain text (i.e., unformatted text) files. My application potentially needs to convert documents that don't use a Unicode character set. For instance, some documents may be encoded in the Chinese GB2312 character set. It would be great if Tika re-coded the output into UTF-8. This would require Tika to reference a mapping between many different character sets and Unicode in order to convert the characters.
Does Tika convert the non-Unicode character set text into Unicode as the output of parseToString()? There are a lot of character sets out there so I would be impressed if Tika did this for more than a few character sets.
Update: I was able to create a couple different files with some non-Latin charsets (GB2312 (Chinese) and KOI8-R (Russian)). Tika.parseToString() couldn't even detect the charset or encoding. I opened an issue on the Tika bug tracker here: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TIKA-1262
When talking about Character Sets in Apache Tika, you need to consider two kinds of files differently. One kind is that of basically just plain text, the other are more complex types (including binary ones)
With the more complex files, Tika mostly uses third party libraries, and these libraries are responsible for returning Java Strings. The exact way of doing that will depend on the file format in question - sometimes the file format will including encoding information, other times it'll be fixed in what it supports. Either way, Tika gets Java Strings, and returns to you a Java String. How you choose to encode that for output is up to you. (For Windows users especially, check the encoding of your terminal, and the font used. There've been lots of "Tika Encoding Problems" which were actually people failing to correctly set the default Java encoding on output, or failing to have a Unicode capable terminal!)
With plain text files, there's no encoding information in the file, all we have is a bunch of bytes. Here, Apache Tika uses one of a number of EncodingDetector instances to do the detection. These use hints, n-grams, language detection etc, to try to work out the most likely encoding of the file based on information given, pattern of bytes in the file etc.
The definition of EncodingDetector is held in the Tika-Core jar, but most of the implentations are held in the Tika-Parsers jar (and loaded by the service loader method, just like Detectors and Parsers). The main ones are here in SVN. If you check there, you'll see the main list of encodings that Tika can detect.
One final thing - the encoding detection is only performed on files that are text files, it isn't done on the binary type files. Depending on how you call Tika, you might need to tweak that and/or provide a hint that it's a text file, so that the EncodingDetector logic gets triggered.
This answer actually comes from a JIRA user on the Tika project. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TIKA-1262
It turns out that if you tell Tika that the file extension is '.txt' it will treat the file as plain text, attempt to detect the encoding, and convert it to UTF.
An easy way to do this is to pass an empty Metadata object to TikaInputStream.get(). This will fill out the resourceName field of the Metadata object. Then pass this object to parseToString(). With the resourceName field set to a file name that ends with .txt the parser knows to treat this file as plain text and will do a encoding detection to try to discover how to decode the file. The string returned from parseToString() is a Java UTF-16 String object. When written to a file you can see that it is Unicode and uses the UCS charset.
Tika tika = new Tika();
Metadata metadata = new Metadata();
TikaInputStream reader = TikaInputStream.get(new File(filepath), metadata);
String contents = tika.parseToString(reader, metadata);
So far this has worked for text files using either GB2312/GB18030 and KOI8-R. This is the expected behavior and it's perfect! I don't know what other charsets/encoding is can handle.

How can I make support Unicode characters in whole my VB 6.0 application

I am facing a problem in my VB 6.0 application that Unicode characters are not supporting. I need to set Chinese characters in field of a recordset in my application-(size of each field is setting from program itself). If we are setting Chinese char into the field of recordset then getting Multiple-step operation error(because of the holding field size is not enough). This error will not fire, if we are setting language to Chinese from Regional settings from control panel in server (Control Panel > Region and Language setting > Administrative Tab > Change system Locale.. > to Chinese )
if we are setting this then time settings of our application will be change. I need some help with out changing from control panel how can we solve this problem.
please help.
Thanks in advance.
In Windows, you can set your regional settings to Chinese, while keeping the time and date format. http://www.techpavan.com/2009/04/07/change-time-format-windows/
For using Unicode in Visual Basic 6 applications, here is an article with thorough explanations and examples: http://www.example-code.com/vb/vbUnicode1.asp
Quoting this link:
Internally, VB6 stores strings as Unicode. Your VB6 program is capable of manipulating strings in any language containing any character -- whether it's Chinese, Japanese, Icelandic, Arabic, etc. It's fully Unicode capable. A single string may contain characters in multiple languages. You can save these strings to databases, files, etc., and there shouldn't be a problem. Problems arise only when trying to display (i.e. render the glyphs) for foreign characters in the standard VB6 controls.
When displaying a string, the standard VB6 textbox and label controls do an implicit (and internal) conversion from Unicode to ANSI. This is the confounding behavior that causes all the trouble. Internal to VB6, the runtime is converting Unicode to the current Windows ANSI code page identifier for the operating system. There is no way to change this conversion short of changing the ANSI code page for the system.
The standard VB6 textbox and label controls display the ANSI bytes according to a character encoding that you can specify. After the Unicode-to-ANSI conversion, VB6 then attempts to display the character data according to the control's Font.Charset property, which if left unchanged is equal to the ANSI charset. Changing the control's Font.Charset changes the way VB6 interprets the "ANSI" bytes. In other words, you're telling VB6 to treat the bytes as some other character encoding instead of "ANSI". Note: VB6 is capable of displaying characters in all the major languages. It simply needs to be told to do so, and the correct bytes need to be in place internally for it to happen.
Try setting the font on those controls to Lucida Sans Unicode to add Unicode Support in.

Is there a way I can add unicode text to a MBCS MFC menu

I have a MFC application compiled with the MBCS character set. I have a submenu off of my main menu that I would like to add unicode characters to. Can that be done?
You can force the use of Unicode strings even in MBCS apps by explicitely calling the Unicode form of an API and passing it a Unicode string.
In your case, ModifyMenuW() is the API that sets the menu item text (assuming the menu item already exists):
ModifyMenuW(GetMenu()->m_hMenu,ID_APP_ABOUT, MF_BYCOMMAND , 0, L"\u573F");
This code displays a Chinese ideogram (I have no idea of its meaning) instead of the original text
The L in front of the string says it's a Unicode string. \u573F is the way you encode a Unicode char in your C++ ASCII source file. The W at the end of the API name: It stands for Wide and denotes the Unicode form of the API.
Note that if your goal is to translate the full UI of your app, this is a complete other story: The method I showed here is only suitable for one-shot calls. You can't create a full UI that way.
You can translate your MBCS app to Japanese, Russian, whatever,... without switching to Unicode (Although it would be a very good idea to do that switch. But that can be costly for legacy apps).
You have 2 friends to help you out there: appTranslator lets you very easily translate your app (and manage your translations (Disclaimer: This is my own ad ;-) and Microsoft AppLocale helps you test MBCS apps in different codepages without actually changing the codepage of your computer (which requires a reboot).

How to discover what codepage to use when converting RTF hex literals to Unicode

I'm parsing RTF 1.5+ files generated by Word 2003+ that may have content from other languages. This content is usually encoded as hex literals (\'xx). I would like to convert these literals to unicode values.
I know my document's code page by looking for ansicpg (\ansi\ansicpg1252).
When I use the ansicpg codepage to decode to Unicode, many languages (like French) seem to convert to the Unicode char values that I expect.
However when I see Russian text (like below), codepage 1252 decodes the content to jibberish.
\f277\lang1049\langfe1033\langnp1049\insrsid5989826\charrsid6817286
\'d1\'f2\'f0\'e0\'ed\'e8\'f6\'fb \'e1\'e5\'e7 \'ed\'e0\'e7\'e2\'e0\'ed\'e8\'ff. \'dd\'f2
\'e0 \'f1\'f2\'f0\'e0\'ed\'e8\'f6\'e0 \'ed\'e5 \'e4\'ee\'eb\'e6\'ed\'e0
\'ee\'f2\'ee\'e1\'f0\'e0\'e6\'e0\'f2\'fc\'f1\'ff \'e2 \'f2\'e0\'e1\'eb\'e8\'f6\'e5
\'e2 \'f1\'ee\'e4\'e5\'f0\'e6\'e0\'ed\'e8\'e8.
I assume that lang1049, langfe1033, langnp1049 should provide me clues so I can programmatically choose a different (non-default) code page for the text that they reference? If so, where can I find information that explains how to map a lang* code to a codepage? Or should I be looking for some other RTF command/directive to provide me with the information I'm looking for? (Or must I use \f277 as a font reference and see if it has an associated codepage?)
\lang really only marks up particular stretches of the text as being in a particular language, and shouldn't impact what code page is to be used for the old non-Unicode \' escapes.
Putting an \ansicpg token in the header should perhaps do it, but seems to be ignored by Word (for both raw bytes and \' escapes.
Or must I use \f277 as a font reference and see if it has an associated codepage?
It looks that way. Changing the \fcharset of the font assigned to a particular stretch of text is the only way I can get Word to change how it treats the bytes, anyway. The codes in this token (see eg here for list) are, aggravatingly, different again from either the language ID or the code page number.
It is not so clear but you can use the RichEdit control in order to convert the RTF to UTF-8 format according to the MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb774304(v=vs.85).aspx
Take a look to the SF_USECODEPAGE for the EM_STREAMOUT message.

What charset to use to store russian text into javascript files as an array

I am creating a coldfusion page, that takes language translation data stored in a table in my database, and makes static js files for each language pairing of english to ___ etc...
I am now starting to work on russian, I was able to get the other languages to work fine..
However, when it saves the file, all the text looks like question marks. Even when I run my translation app, the text for just that language looks like all ?????
I have tried writing it via cffile as utf-8 or ISO-8859-1 but neither seems to get it to display properly.
Any suggestions?
Have you tried ISO-8859-5? I believe it's the encoding that "should" be used for Russian.
By all means do use UTF-8 over any other encoding type. You need to make sure that:
your cfm templates were written to disk with UTF-8 encoding (notepad++ handles that nicely, and so does Eclipse or the new ColdFusion Builder)
your database was created with the proper codepage for nvarchar (and varchar) datatypes
your database connection handles UTF-8
How to go about the last two items depends on your database back-end. Coldfusion is quite agnostic in that regard, as it will happily use any jdbc driver that you may need.
When working in a multi-character set environment, character set conversion issues can occur and it can be difficult to determine where the conversion issue occurred.
There are two categories into which conversion issues can be placed. The first involves sending data in the wrong format to the client API. Although this cannot happen with Unicode APIs, it is possible with all other client APIs and results in garbage data.
The second category of issue involves a character that does not have an equivalent in the final character set, or in one of the intermediate character sets. In this case, a substitution character is used. This is called lossy conversion and can happen with any client API. You can avoid lossy conversions by configuring the database to use UTF-8 for the database character set.
The advantage of UTF-8 over any other encoding is that you can handle any number of languages in the same database / client.
I can't personally reproduce this problem at all. Is the ColdFusion template that is making the call itself UTF-8? (with or without a BOM it matters not for Russian). In any case UTF-8 is absolutely what you should be using. Make sure you get a UTF-8 compliant editor. Which is most things on Mac. On Windows you could use Scite or GVim.
The correct encoding to use in a .js file is whatever encoding the parent page is in. Whilst there are methods to serve JavaScript using a different encoding to the page including it, they don't work on all browsers.
So make sure your web page is being saved and served in an encoding that contains the Russian characters, and then save the .js file using the same encoding. That will be either:
ISO-8859-5. A single-byte encoding with Cyrillic in the high bytes, similar to Windows code page 1251. cp1251 will be the default encoding when you save in a text editor from a Russian install of Windows;
or UTF-8. A multi-byte encoding that contains every character. All modern websites should be using UTF-8.
(ISO-8859-1 is Western European and does not include any Cyrillic. It is similar to code page 1252, the default on a Western Windows install. It's of no use to you.)
So, best is to save both the cf template and the js file as UTF-8, and add <cfprocessingdirective pageencoding="utf-8"> if CF doesn't pick it up automatically.
If you can't control the encoding of the page that includes the script (for example because it's a third party), then you can't use any non-ASCII characters directly. You would have to use JavaScript string literal escapes instead:
var translation_ru= {
launchMyCalendar: '\u0417\u0430\u043f\u0443\u0441\u043a \u041c\u043e\u0439 \u043a\u0430\u043b\u0435\u043d\u0434\u0430\u0440\u044c'
};
when it saves to file it is "·ÐßãáÚ ¼ÞÙ ÚÐÛÕÝÔÐàì" so the charset is wrong
Looks like you've saved as cp1251 (ie. default codepage on a Russian machine) and then copied the file to a Western server where the default codepage is cp1252.
I also just found out that my text editor of choice, textpad, doesn't support unicode.
Yes, that was my reason for no longer using it too. EmEditor (commercial) and Notepad++ (open-source) are good replacements.