How can I make currency symbols apper in a batch file? - windows-xp

When I use currency symbols, they come out wrong when I run the file.
If I use £ (Alt+0163),
It displays ú (Alt+163).
Any ideas???

This has to do with the character encodings that your text editor and your terminal are using. If what you see in your editor is not what you see in your terminal output, check the encodings used in the respective configurations. FYI for the pound sign to be at codepoint 163, you are using Windows-1252.

If your command prompt is set to use Raster fonts then your command output is always interpreted using the code page of that font, which in your case is probably 850. If you change your command prompt to use a Unicode font (i.e. Lucida Console) then it will use the active code page which you can change using the chcp command.
Input to the command prompt is also interpreted as the same code page of course, so you can type in echo £>pound.txt to create pound.txt using code page 850.

Related

How do I make \uXXXX appear in Eclipse?

How do I let my Eclipse use \uXXXX symbols?
Should I change the font?
Eclipse will never use \u escapes for display in the console window. That's just not in its repertoire.
However, that's probably not what you want.
If you have coded some Java with a \u escape in the source, your first problem is to configure the run / debug configuration to use an appropriate encoding for the console window. UTF-8 is usually the right answer. Then, you need to select an appropriate font in the eclipse preferences for the particular character you've chosen. However, whatever you do, "\uxxxx" will never be what comes out. What you will get is the character specified by your unicode escape.
If you're just trying to see unicode output in the console, make sure the font you're using supports unicode and that the output encoding is set to UTF-8.
When running this in my pretty vanilla install of Eclipse:
System.out.println("\u0CA0_\u0CA0");
I get this as expected in the Eclipse console output:
ಠ_ಠ

Get window title with AppleScript in Unicode

I've stuck with the following problem:
I have a script which is retrieving title form the Firefox window:
tell application "Firefox"
if the (count of windows) is not 0 then
set window_name to name of front window
end if
end tell
It works well as long as the title contains only English characters but when title contains some non-ASCII characters(Cyrillic in my case) it produces some utf-8 garbage. I've analyzed this garbage a bit and it seems that my Cyrillic character is converted to the Utf-8 without any concerning about codepage i.e instead of using Cyrillic codepage for conversion it uses non codepages at all and I have utf-8 text with characters different from those in the window title.
My question is: How can I retrieved the window title in utf-8 directly without any conversion?
I can achieve this goal by using AXAPI but I want to achieve this by AppleScript because AXAPI needs some option turned on in the system.
UPD:
It works fine in the AppleScript Editor. But I'm compiling it through the C++ code via OSACompile->OSAExecute->OSADisplay
I don't know the guts of the AppleScript Editor so maybe it has some inside information about how to encode the characters
I've found the answer when wrote update. Sometimes it is good to ask a question for better it understanding :)
So for the future searchers: If you want to use unicode result of the script execution you should provide typeUnicodeText to the OSADisplay then you will have result in the UTF-16LE in the result AEDesc

How to do proper Unicode and ANSI output redirection on cmd.exe?

If you are doing automation on windows and you are redirecting the output of different commands (internal cmd.exe or external, you'll discover that your log files contains combined Unicode and ANSI output (meaning that they are invalid and will not load well in viewers/editors).
Is it is possible to make cmd.exe work with UTF-8? This question is not about display, s about stdin/stdout/stderr redirection and Unicode.
I am looking for a solution that would allow you to:
redirect the output of the internal commands to a file using UTF-8
redirect output of external commands supporting Unicode to the files but encoded as UTF-8.
If it is impossible to obtain this kind of consistence using batch files, is there another way of solving this problem, like using python scripting for this? In this case, I would like to know if it is possible to do the Unicode detection alone (user using the scripting should not remember if the called tools will output Unicode or not, it will just expect to convert the output to UTF-8.
For simplicity we'll assume that if the tool output is not-Unicode it will be considered as UTF-8 (no codepage conversion).
You can use chcp to change the active code page. This will be used for redirecting text as well:
chcp 65001
Keep in mind, though, that this will have no effect if cmd was started with the /u switch which forces Unicode (UTF-16 in this case) redirection output. If that switch is active then all output will be in UTF-16LE, regardless of the codepage set with chcp.
Also note that the console will be unusable for interactive output when set to Raster Fonts. I'm getting fun error messages in that case:
C:\Users\Johannes Rössel\Documents>x
Active code page: 65001
The system cannot write to the specified device.
So either use a sane setup (TrueType font for the console) or don't pull this stunt when using the console interactively and having a path that contains non-ASCII characters.
binmode(STDOUT, ":unix");
without
use encoding 'utf8';
Helped me. With that i had wide character in print warning.

How to use Unicode characters in a vim script?

I'm trying to get vim to display my tabs as ⇥ so they cannot be mistaken for actual characters. I'd hoped the following would work:
if has("multi_byte")
set lcs=tab:⇥
else
set lcs=tab:>-
endif
However, this gives me
E474: Invalid argument: lcs=tab:⇥
The file is UTF-8 encoded and includes a BOM.
Googling "vim encoding" or similar gives me many results about the encoding of edited files, but nothing about the encoding of executed scripts. How to get this character into my .vimrc so that it is properly displayed?
The tab setting requires two characters. From :help listchars:
tab:xy Two characters to be used to show a tab. The first
char is used once. The second char is repeated to
fill the space that the tab normally occupies.
"tab:>-" will show a tab that takes four spaces as
">---". When omitted, a tab is show as ^I.
Something like :set lcs=tab:⇥- works but kind of defeats your purpose as it results in tabs that look like ⇥--- instead of ---⇥ which I'm assuming is probably what you wanted.
Try:
set lcs=tab:⇥\
Make certain to put a space after the '\' so you can escape the space.

ja chars in windows batch file

What is the secret to japanese characters in a Windows XP .bat file?
We have a script for open a file off disk in kiosk mode:
#ECHO OFF
"%ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" –K "%CD%\XYZ.htm"
It works fine when the OS is english, and it works fine for the japanese OS when XYZ is made up of english characters, but when XYZ is made up of japanese characters, they are getting mangled into gibberish by the time IE tries to find the file.
If the batch file is saved as Unicode or Unicode big endian the script wont even run.
I have tried various ways of encoding the japanese characters. ampersand escape does not work (〹)
Percent escape does not work %xx%xx%xx
ABC works, AB%43 becomes AB3 in the error message, so it looks like the percent escape is trying to do parameter substitution. This is confirmed because %043 puts in the name of the script !
One thing that does work is pasting the ja characters into a command prompt.
#ECHO OFF
CD "%ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer\"
Set /p URL ="file to open: "
start iexplore.exe –K %URL%
This tells me that iexplore.exe will accept and parse the parameter correctly when it has ja characters, but not when they are written into the script.
So it would be nice to know what the secret may be to getting the parameter into IE successfully via the batch file, as opposed to via the clipboard and an environment variable.
Any suggestions greatly appreciated !
best regards
Richard Collins
P.S.
another post has has made this suggestion, which i am yet to follow up:
You might have more luck in cmd.exe if you opened it in UNICODE mode. Use "cmd /U".
Batch renaming of files with international chars on Windows XP
I will need to find out if this can be from inside the script.
For the record, a simple answer has been found for this question.
If the batch file is saved as ANSI - it works !
First of all: Batch files are pretty limited in their internationalization support. There is no direct way of telling cmd what codepage a batch file is in. UTF-16 is out anyway, since cmd won't even parse that.
I have detailed an option in my answer to the following question:
Batch file encoding
which might be helpful for your needs.
In principle it boils down to the following:
Use an encoding which has single-byte mappings for ASCII
Put a chcp ... at the start of the batch file
Use the set codepage for the rest of the file
You can use codepage 65001, which is UTF-8 but make sure that your file doesn't include the U+FEFF character at the start (used as byte-order mark in UTF-16 and UTF-32 and sometimes used as marker for UTF-8 files as well). Otherwise the first command in the file will produce an error message.
So just use the following:
echo off
chcp 65001
"%ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" –K "%CD%\XYZ.htm"
and save it as UTF-8 without BOM (Note: Notepad won't allow you to do that) and it should work.
cmd /u won't do anything here, that advice is pretty much bogus. The /U switch only specifies that Unicode will be used for redirection of input and output (and piping). It has nothing to do with the encoding the console uses for output or reading batch files.
URL encoding won't help you either. cmd is hardly a web browser and outside of HTTP and the web URL encoding isn't exactly widespread (hence the name). cmd uses percent signs for environment variables and arguments to batch files and subroutines.
"Ampersand escape" also known as character entities known from HTML and XML, won't work either, because cmd is also not HTML or XML. The ampersand is used to execute multiple commands in a single line.
I too suffered this frustrating problem in batch/cmd files. However, so far as I can see, no one yet has stated the reason why this problem occurs, here or in other, similar posts at StackOverflow. The nearest statement addressing this was:
“First of all: Batch files are pretty limited in their internationalization support. There is no direct way of telling cmd what codepage a batch file is in.”
Here is the basic problem. Cmd files are the Windows-2000+ successor to MS-DOS and IBM-DOS bat(ch) files. MS and IBM DOS (1984 vintage) were written in the IBM-PC character set (code page 437). There, the 8th-bit codes were assigned (or “clothed” with) characters different from those assigned to the corresponding codes of Windows, ANSI, or Unicode. The presumption of CP437 encoding is unalterable (except, as previously noted, through cmd.exe /u). Where the characters of the IBM-PC set have exact counterparts in the Unicode set, Windows Explorer remaps them to the Unicode counterparts. Alas, even Windows-1252 characters like š and ¾ have no counterpart in code page 437.
Here is another way to see the problem. Try opening your batch/cmd script using the Windows Edit.com program (at C:\Windows\system32\Edit.com). The Windows-1252 character 0145 ‘ (Unicode 8217) instead appears as IBM-PC 145 æ. A batch command to rename Mary'sFile.txt as Mary’sFile.txt fails, as it is interpreted as MaryæsFile.txt.
This problem can be avoided in the case of copying a file named Mary’sFile.txt: cite it as Mary?sFile.txt, e.g.:
xCopy Mary?sFile.txt Mary?sLastFile.txt
You will see a similar treatment (substitution of question marks) in a DIR list of files having Unicode characters.
Obviously, this is useless unless an extant file has the Unicode characters. This solution’s range is paltry and inadequate, but please make what use of it you can.
You can try to use Shift-JIS encoding.