I'm having a little trouble getting erlang to give me a unicode string.
Here's what works:
io:format("~ts~n", [<<226,132,162>>]).
™
ok
But instead of printing to the console, I want to assign it to a variable. So I thought:
T = lists:flatten(io_lib:format("~ts~n", [<<226,132,162>>])).
T.
[8482,10]
How can I get T in the io_lib example to contain the ™ symbol so I can write it to a network stream?
Instead of assigning the flattened version to a variable for sending on the network, can you instead re-write your code that sends over the network to accept the binary in the first place and use the formatted write mechanism ~ts when sending over the socket?
That would also let you avoid the lists:flatten, which isn't needed for the built-in IO mechanisms.
It does contain the trademark symbol: as you can see here, 8482 is its code. It isn't printed as ™ in the shell, because the shell prints as strings only lists which contain printable character code in Latin-1. So [8482, 10] is a Unicode string (in UTF-32 encoding). If you want to convert it to a different encoding, use the unicode module.
First thing is knowing what you need to do. Then you can adapt your code the best way you find.
Erlang represents unicode strings as lists of codepoints. Unicode codepoints are integers, not bytes. Snce you can only send bytes over the network, things like unicode strings, need to be encoded in byte squences by the sending side and decoded by the receiving side. UTF-8 is the most used encoding for unicode strings, and that's what your binary is, the UTF-8 encoding of the unicode string composed by the codepoint 8482.
What you get out of the io_lib:format call is the erlang string representation of that codepoint plus the new line character.
A very reasonable way to send unicode strings over the network is encoding them in UTF-8. Don't use io_lib:format for that, though. unicode:characters_to_binary/1 is the function meant to transform unicode strings in UTF-8 encoded binaries.
In the receiving side (and probably even better in your whole application) you'll have to decide how you will handle the strings, either in encoded binaries (or lists) or in plain unicode lists. But over the network the only choice is using binaries (or iolists wich are possibly deep lists of bytes) and I'll bet the most reasonable encoding for your application will be UTF-8.
Related
I am trying to convert UTF-8 string to Unicode (code point) list with Erlang library "unicode. My input data is a string "АБВ" (Russian string, which correct Unicode representation is [1040,1041,1042]), encoded in UTF-8. When I am running following code:
1> unicode:characters_to_list(<<208,144,208,145,208,146>>,utf8).
[1040,1041,1042]
it returns correct value, but following:
2> unicode:characters_to_list([208,144,208,145,208,146],utf8).
[208,144,208,145,208,146]
does not. Why does it happens? As I read in specification, input data could be either binary or list of chars, so, as for me, I am doing everything right.
The signature of the function is unicode:characters_to_list(Data, InEncoding), it expects Data to be either binary containing string encoded in InEncoding encoding or possibly deep list of characters (code points) and binaries in InEncoding encoding. It returns list of unicode characters. Characters in erlang are integers.
When you call unicode:characters_to_list(<<208,144,208,145,208,146>>, utf8) or unicode:characters_to_list([1040,1041,1042], utf8) it correctly decodes unicode string (yes, second is noop as long as Data is list of integers). But when you call unicode:characters_to_list([208,144,208,145,208,146], utf8) erlang thinks you pass list of 6 characters in utf8 encoding, since it's already unicode the output will be exactly the same.
There is no byte type in erlang, but you assume that unicode:characters_to_list/2 will accept list of bytes and will behave correctly.
To sum it up. There are two usual ways to represent string in erlang, they are bitstrings and lists of characters. unicode:characters_to_list(Data, InEncoding) takes string Data in one of these representations (or combination of them) in InEncoding encoding and converts it to list of unicode codepoints.
If you have list [208,144,208,145,208,146] like in your example you can convert it to binary using erlang:list_to_binary/1 and then pass it to unicode:characters_to_list/2, i.e.
1> unicode:characters_to_list(list_to_binary([208,144,208,145,208,146]), utf8).
[1040,1041,1042]
unicode module supports only unicode and latin-1. Thus, (since the function expects codepoints of unicode or latin-1) characters_to_list does not need to do anything with list in a case of flat list of codepoints. However, list may be deep (unicode:characters_to_list([[1040],1041,<<1042/utf8>>]).). That is a reason to support list datatype for Data argument.
<<208,144,208,145,208,146>> is an UTF-8 binary.
[208,144,208,145,208,146] is a list of bytes (not code points).
[1040,1041,1042] is a list of code points.
You are passing a list of bytes, but the function wants a list of chars or a binary.
I'm working with a binary file that references another file using absolute paths.
The path contains both japanese and ascii characters.
The length of the string is given, so I can just read that many bytes and convert it into a string.
However the problem is trying to convert the string. If I specify the encoding as ascii, it'll fail on the japanese characters. If I specify it as japanese encoding (shift-jis or something), it won't read the english characters properly.
One byte is used for each ascii character, while two bytes are used for each japanese character.
What is the fastest and cleanest way to convert these bytes into a string? The encodings are known. Will the same technique work in older versions of python.
This sounds like you have fallen victim for a misunderstand the basics of Unicode and encodings. It may be that you have not, but misunderstandnings are common and understandable, while the situation you describe are not.
A string of bytes that contains mixed encodings are, per definition, invalid in any of these encodings. If this really was the case, you would have to split the bytes string into it's parts, and decode every part separately. In this case it would probably mean splitting on the path separators, so it would be reasonably easy, but in other cases it would not. However, I serously doubt that this is the case, as it would mean that your source is insane. That happens, but it is unlikely. :-)
If the source gives you one path as a bytes string, it is most likely that this string uses only one encoding. It may contain both Japanese and ASCII-characters and still be using one encoding. The most common encodings that can handle both Japanese and ASCII are UTF-8 and UTF-16. My guess is that your source uses one of those. In fact, since you write "One byte is used for each ascii character, while two bytes are used for each japanese character" it is probably UTF-8. It could also be Shift JIS, but it seems you already tried that.
If not, please explain what your source is, and give examples of the byte strings (in ASCII/HEX) that you are given.
What is the best way to (losslessly) convert Unicode to a lower-order byte encoding (8 bits), in a language inspecific way? I want a format that is standard, i.e. has widespread library support for conversion both directions.
If I were using Python, I would use repr:
In [1]: x = u"Российская Федерация"
In [2]: repr(x)
Out[2]: "u'\\xd0\\xa0\\xd0\\xbe\\xd1\\x81\\xd1\\x81\\xd0\\xb8\\xd0\\xb9\\xd1\\x81\\xd0\\xba\\xd0\\xb0\\xd1\\x8f \\xd0\\xa4\\xd0\\xb5\\xd0\\xb4\\xd0\\xb5\\xd1\\x80\\xd0\\xb0\\xd1\\x86\\xd0\\xb8\\xd1\\x8f'"
However, I'm looking for a format that has good library support for converting the second string back to the first, in a variety of languages.
Out[2]: "u'\xd0\xa0\xd0\xbe\xd1\x81\xd1\x81\xd0\xb8\xd0\xb9\xd1\x81\xd0\xba\xd0\xb0\xd1\x8f \xd0\xa4\xd0\xb5\xd0\xb4\xd0\xb5\xd1\x80\xd0\xb0\xd1\x86\xd0\xb8\xd1\x8f'"
If that's what you see, your terminal is set up wrong, it's treating UTF-8 input as being ISO-8859-1 (or cp1252 in the case of the Windows console, which isn't possible to set up right).
The proper Python repr of Российская Федерация would be the Unicode literal:
u'\u0420\u043e\u0441\u0441\u0438\u0439\u0441\u043a\u0430\u044f \u0424\u0435\u0434\u0435\u0440\u0430\u0446\u0438\u044f'
Which as it happens is pretty close to the JavaScript/JSON string literal
"\u0420\u043e\u0441\u0441\u0438\u0439\u0441\u043a\u0430\u044f \u0424\u0435\u0434\u0435\u0440\u0430\u0446\u0438\u044f"
If you want a 7-bit-safe (ASCII) representation of a Unicode string, JSON is a reasonable choice of format. Get it by using json.dumps() though rather than hacking the Python repr, since there are some subtle inconsistencies between the two formats.
Other well-understood ASCII representations you could try might include URL-encoding (%D0%A0%D0%BE...) and XML character escapes (<value>Рос...</value>).
If you only need an arbitrary binary representation that doesn't need to be 7-bit safe, as Max mentioned, just .encode('utf-8').
UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are all standard. Perhaps UTF-8 is most common on the Internet; UTF-16 is used internally by Windows and Java. Any language with Unicode support will have encoding and decoding functions for all of them. In Python you can use the .encode method of unicode strings and .decode method of string to convert between them.
If you need something that's 7-bit clean (no 8th bits set), there's also UTF-7.
Based on the link below, I'm confused as to whether the Lua programming language supports Unicode.
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaUnicode
It appears it does but has limitations. I simply don't understand, are the limitation anything big/key or not a big deal?
You can certainly store unicode strings in lua, as utf8. You can use these as you would any string.
However Lua doesn't provide any default support for higher-level "unicode aware" operations on such strings—e.g., counting string length in characters, converting lower-to-upper-case, etc. Whether this lack is meaningful for you really depends on what you intend to do with these strings.
Possible approaches, depending on your use:
If you just want to input/output/store strings, and generally use them as "whole units" (for table indexing etc), you may not need any special handling at all. In this case, you just treat these strings as binary blobs.
Due to utf8's clever design, some types of string manipulation can be done on strings containing utf8 and will yield the correct result without taking any special care.
For instance, you can append strings, split them apart before/after ascii characters, etc. As an example, if you have a string "開発.txt" and you search for "." in that string using string.find (string_var, "."), and then split it using the normal string.sub function into "開発" and ".txt", those result strings will be correct utf8 strings even though you're not using any kind of "unicode-aware" algorithm.
Similarly, you can do case-conversions on only the ASCII characters in strings (those with the high bit zero), and treat the rest of the strings as binary without screwing them up.
Some utf8-aware operations are so simple that it's easy to just write one's own functions to do them.
For instance, to calculate the length in unicode-characters of a string, just count the number of characters with the high bit zero (ASCII characters), and the number of characters with the top two bits 11 ("leading bytes" for non-ASCII characters); the length is the sum of those two.
For more complex operations—e.g., case-conversion on non-ASCII characters, etc.—you'll probably have to use a Lua unicode library, such as those on the (previously mentioned) Lua-users Unicode page
Lua does not have any support for unicode (other than accepting any byte value in strings). The library slnunicode has a lot of unicode string functions, however. For example unicode.utf8.len.
(note: this answer is completely stolen from grom's comment on another question - I just think it deserves its own answer)
If you want a short answer, it is 'yes and no' as put on the linked site.
Lua supports Unicode in the way that specifying, storing and querying arbitrary byte values in strings is supported, so you can store any kind of Unicode-encoding encoded string in a Lua string.
What is not supported is iteration by unicode character, there is no standard function for string length in unicode characters etc. So the higher-level kind of Unicode support (like what is available in Python with length, lower -> upper case conversion, encoding in arbitrary coding etc) is not available.
Lua 5.3 was released now. It comes with a basic UTF-8 library.
You can use the utf8 library to do things about UTF-8 encoding, like getting the length of a UTF-8 string (not number of bytes as string.len), matching each characters (not bytes), etc.
It doesn't provide native support other than encoding, like is this character a Chinese character?
It supports it in the sense that you can use Unicode in Lua strings. It depends specifically on what you're planning to do, but most of the limitations can be fairly easily worked around by extending Lua with your own functions.
I have a Perl script that is being called by third parties to send me names of people who have registered my software. One of these parties encodes the names in UTF-8, so I have adapted my script accordingly to decode UTF-8 to ASCII with Encode::decode_utf8(...).
This usually works fine, but every 6 months or so one of the names contains cyrillic, greek or romanian characters, so decoding the name results in garbage characters such as "ПодражанÑкаÑ". I have to follow-up with the customer and ask him for a "latin character version" of his name in order to issue a registration code.
So, is there any Perl module that can detect whether there are such characters and automatically translates them to their closest ASCII representation if necessary?
It seems that I can use Lingua::Cyrillic::Translit::ICAO plus Lingua::DetectCharset to handle Cyrillic, but I would prefer something that works with other character sets as well.
I believe you could use Text::Unidecode for this, it is precisely what it tries to do.
In the documentation for Text::Unicode, under "Caveats", it appears that this phrase is incorrect:
Make sure that the input data really is a utf8 string.
UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding, whereas Text::Unidecode only accepts a fixed-length (two-byte) encoding for each character. So that sentence should read:
Make sure that the input data really is a string of two-byte Unicode characters.
This is also referred to as UCS-2.
If you want to convert strings which really are utf8, you would do it like so:
my $decode_status = utf8::decode($input_to_be_converted);
my $converted_string = unidecode ($input_to_be_converted);
If you have to deal with UTF-8 data that are not in the ascii range, your best bet is to change your backend so it doesn't choke on utf-8. How would you go about transliterating kanji signs?
If you get cyrilic text there is no "closest ASCII representation" for many characters.