I am trying to create the Greek character phi in iTextSharp along with a number of other characters. I managed to do this by outputing:
Convert.ToChar(593)
When I look at the Wikipedia reference though, phi can be represented by
U+03A6 (934 decimal)
U+03C6 (966 decimal)
U+03D5 (965 decimal)
U+0278 (632 decimal)
However when I try
Convert.ToChar(934)
Convert.ToChar(966)
Convert.ToChar(965)
Convert.ToChar(632)
I get blanks.
How do I output these Unicode characters?
I strongly suspect that the problem isn't the character value, but the encoding of the font[s] used to display that character.
If a given font/encoding cannot display a given character, you get a blank. When in doubt, use BaseFont.IDENTITY_H encoding. If that character (well... "glyph" really) exists in that font, you'll have access to it. You can even ask a BaseFont if it can display a given character (IIRC taking its glyphs and encoding into account) with myBaseFont.charExists(int).
Related
As far as I understand, a character encoding maps bits to integers and a character set maps integers to characters.
So in the Unicode character set there is a telephone character. It is represented using the integer 9742, more commonly represented using Hexadecimal as 260E. This is then saved to a file using UTF-8 which translates the integer 9742 into 10011000001110. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Yesterday I created a text file that used the Unicode character set and UTF-8 encoding and I saved it to my desktop. I then reopened the file in my text editor and started to manually switch the character sets for fun. Unsurprisingly there were problems and odd characters starting displaying! I noticed that only some of the characters are misrepresented though. This got me thinking, why do only some of the characters break? Why not all?
Someone told me that the characters breaking are those outside the original ASCII specification. Upon reflection this seemed to make sense, as it's only non US characters that break. I was told that because all character sets use the ASCII character set up to the first 128 characters they will remain unbroken, and that it's the characters above 127 that break. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Finally, I got thinking. Are there any character sets that don't respect ASCII? If so, what are they called and what are they used for?
Based on my findings from the comments I am able to answer my own question. Thank you to everyone who commented!
Yes, there are a couple; EBCDIC and Baudot.
I am working on decoding text. I am trying to find the character code for the — character, not to be mistaken for -, in ASCII. I have tried unsuccessfully. Does anybody know how to convert it?
Quotation from wiki (Em dash)
When an actual em dash is unavailable—as in the ASCII character set—a double ("--") or triple hyphen-minus ("---") is used. In Unicode, the em dash is U+2014 (decimal 8212).
Em dash character is not a part of ASCII character set.
— is known as an Em Dash. It's character code is \u2014. It is not an ASCII character, so you cannot decode it with the ASCII character set because it is not in the ASCII character table. You would probably want to use UTF8 instead.
Windows
For Windows on a keyboard with a Numeric keypad:
Use Alt+0150 (en dash), Alt+0151 (em dash), or Alt+8722 (minus sign) using the numeric keypad.
This character does not exist in ASCII, but only in Unicode, usually encoded by UTF-8.
In UTF-8, characters are encoded by 2- or 3-byte sequences (or occasionally longer), where none of the two or three bytes is a valid ASCII code, where all of them are outside the ASCII range of 0 through 127.
One suspects that the foregoing only partly answers your question, but if so then this is probably because your question is, inadvertently, only partly asked. For further details, you can extend your question with more specifics.
The character — is not part of the ASCII set.
But if you are looking to convert it to some other format (like U+hex), you can use this online tool. Put your character into the first green box and click "Convert" (above the box)
further below you'll find a number of different codes, including U+hex:
U+2014
Feel free to edit this answer if the link breaks or leave a comment so I can find a replacement.
Alt + 0151 seems to do the trick—perhaps it doesn't work on all keyboards.
alt-196 - while holding down the 'Alt' key, type 196 on the numeric keypad, then release the 'Alt' key
Where can I get a list of ASCII codes corresponding to Japanese kanji, hiragana and katakana characters. I am doing a java function and Javascript which determines wether it is a Japanese character. What is its range in the ASCII code?
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, only includes 128 characters (not all of them even printable), and is based on the needs of American use circa 1960. It includes nothing related to any Japanese characters.
I believe you want the Unicode code points for some characters, which you can lookup in the charts provided by unicode.org.
Please see my similar question regarding Kanji/Kana characters. As #coobird mentions it may be tricky to decide what range you want to check against since many Kanji overlap with Chinese characters.
In short, the Unicode ranges for hiragana and katakana are:
Hiragana: Unicode: 3040-309F
Katakana: Unicode: 30A0–30FF
If you find this answer useful please upvote #coobird's answer to my question as well.
がんばって！
Well it has been a while, but here's a link to tables of hiragana, katakana, kanji etc and their Unicodes...
http://www.rikai.com/library/kanjitables/kanji_codes.unicode.shtml
BUT, as you probably know Unicodes are hexadecimal. You can translate them into decimal numbers using Windows Calc in programmer mode and then input that number as an ASCII code and it will produce the character you want, well depending on what you're putting it into. It will in MS Wordpad and Word(not Notepad).
For example the hiragana ぁ is 3041 in Unicode. 3041 is hexadecimal and translates to 12353 in decimal. If you enter 12353 as an ASCII code into Wordpad or Word i.e hold Alt, enter 12353 on the number-pad then release Alt, it will print ぁ. The range of Japanese characters seems to be Hiragana:3040 - 309f(12352-12447 in ASCII), Katakana:30a0 - 30ff(12448-12543 in ASCII), Kanji: 4e00-4DB5(19968-19893 ASCII), so there are several ranges. There's also a half-width katakana range on that chart.
Japanese characters won't be in the ASCII range, they'll be in Unicode. What do you want, just the char value for each character?
I won't rehash the ASCII part. Just have a look at the Unicode Code Charts.
Kanji will have a Unicode "Script" property of Hani, hiragana will have a "Script" property of Hira, and katakana have a "Script" property of Kana. In Java, you can determine the "Script" property of a character using the Character.UnicodeScript class: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/Character.UnicodeScript.html I don't know if you can determine a character's "Script" property in Javascript.
Of course, most kanji are characters that are also used in Chinese; given a character like 猫, it is impossible to tell whether it's being used as a Chinese character or a Japanese character.
I think what you mean by ASCII code for Japanese is the SBCS (Single Byte Character Set) equivalent in Japanese. For Japanese you only have a MBCS (Multi-Byte Character Sets) that has a combination of single byte character and multibyte characters. So for a Japanese text file saved in MBCS you have non-Japanese characters (english letters and numbers and common non-alphanumeric characters) saved as one byte and Japanese characters saved as two bytes.
Assuming that you are not referring to UNICODE which is a uniform DBCS (Double Byte Character Set) where each character is exactly two bytes. Actually to be more correct lately UNICODE also has multiple DBCS because the character set could not accomodate other character anymore. Some UNICODE character consiste of 4 bytes already having the first two bytes as leading character.
If you are referring to The first one (MBCS) that and not UNICODE then there are a lot of Japanese character set like Shift-JIS (the more popular one). So I suggest that you search Shift-JIS character map. Although there are other Japanese character set map aside from Shift-JIS.
I have a Perl script that takes text values from a MySQL table and writes it to a text file. The problem is, when I open the text file for viewing I am getting a lot of hex characters like \x92 and \x93 which stands for single and double quotes, I guess.
I am using DBI->quote function to escape the special chars before writing the values to the text file. I have tried using Encode::Encoder, but with no luck. The character set on both the tables is latin1.
How do I get rid of those hex characters and get the character to show in the text file?
ISO Latin-1 does not define characters in the range 0x80 to 0x9f, so displaying these bytes in hex is expected. Most likely your data is actually encoded in Windows-1252, which is the same as Latin1 except that it defines additional characters (including left/right quotes) in this range.
\x92 and \x93 are empty characters in the latin1 character set (see here or here). If you are certain that you are indeed dealing with latin1, you can simply delete them.
It sounds like you need to change the character sets on the tables, or translate the non-latin-1 characters into latin-1 equivalents. I'd prefer the first solution. Get used to Unicode; you're going to have to learn it at some point. :)
I'm trying to get some legacy code to display Chinese characters properly. One character encoding I'm trying to work with starts with a 0x7F and is 4 bytes long (including the 0x7F byte). Does anyone know what kind of encoding this is and where I can find information for it? Thanks..
UPDATE:
I've also had to work with some Japanese encoding that starts every character with a 0xE3 and is three bytes long. It displays on my computer properly if I choose the Japanese locale in Windows, however, it doesn't display properly in our application. However, if any other locale other than Japanese is selected, I cannot even view the filenames properly. So I'm guessing this encoding is not Unicode. Anyone know what it is? Is it ANSI? Is it Shift JIS?
For the Chinese one, I've tested it with Unicode and UTF-8 characters and I'm getting the same pattern; 0x7F followed by three bytes. Are Unicode and UTF-8 the same?
One character encoding I'm trying to work with starts with a 0x7F and is 4 bytes long
What are the other bytes? Do you have any Latin text in this encoding?
If it's “0x7f 0x... 0x00 0x00” you are looking at UTF-32LE. It could also be two UTF-16 (either LE or BE) characters.
Most East Asian encodings use 0x80-0xFF as lead bytes for non-ASCII characters; there is none I know of that would use a leading 0x7F as anything other than an ASCII delete.
ETA:
are there supposed to be Byte Order Marks?
There doesn't need to be a BOM if there is an out-of-band way of signalling that the encoding is ‘UTF-32LE’ (possibly one that is lost before it gets to you).
I've also had to work with some Japanese encoding that starts every character with a 0xE3 and is three bytes long.
That's surely UTF-8. Sequence 0xE3 0x... 0x... would result in a character between U+3000 and U+4000, which is where the hiragana/katakana live.
It displays on my computer properly if I choose the Japanese locale in Windows, however, it doesn't display properly in our application.
Then chances are your application is is one of the regrettable horde of non-Unicode-compliant apps, still using ‘A’(*) versions of the Win32 interfaces inside of the ‘W’-suffixed ones. Whether you can read in the string according to its real encoding is moot: a non-Unicode-compliant app will never be able to display an East Asian ideograph on a Western locale.
(*: named for “ANSI”, which is Windows's misleading term for “whatever the system codepage is set to at the moment”. That's why changing your locale affected it.)
ETA(2):
OK, cracked it. It's not any standardised encoding I've met before, but it's relatively easy to decipher if you assume the premise that Unicode code points are being encoded.
0x00-0x7E: plain ASCII
0x7F A B C: Unicode character
The character encoded in a Unicode escape can be calculated by taking the index in a key string of A, B and C and adding together:
A*0x1000 + B*0x40 + C
That is, it's a base-64 character set, but it's not the usual Base64 standard. A little experimentation gives a key string of:
.0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
The ‘.’ and ‘_’ characters are guesses, since none of the characters you posted uses them. We'd need more data to find out the exact string.
So, for example:
0x7F 3 u g
A=4 B=58 C=44
4*0x1000 + 58*0x40 + 44 = 0x4EAC
U+4EAC = 京
ETA(3):
Yeah, it should be easy to create a native Unicode string by sucking out each code point manually and joining as a character. Not quite sure what's available on whatever platform you're using, but any Unicode-capable platform should be able to make a string from codepoints simply (and hopefully without having to manually re-encode to UTF-16LE bytes).
I figured it must be Unicode codepoints by noticing that the three example characters had first escape-characters in the same general range, and in the same numerical order as their Unicode codepoints. The other two characters seemed to change randomly, so it was very likely a big-endian encoding of the code point, and probably a base-64 encoding as 6 is as many bits as you can get out of readable ASCII.
Standard Base64 itself starts with letters, which would put something starting with a number too far up to be in the Basic Multilingual Plane. So I started guessing with ‘0123456789ABCDEFG...’ which would be the other obvious choice of key string. That got resulting numbers that were close to the code points for the given characters, but a bit too low. Inserting an extra character at the start of the key string (so digit ‘0’ doesn't map to number 0) got one of the characters right and the other two very close; the one that was right had no lower-case letters, so to change only the lower-case letters I inserted another character between the upper and lower cases. This came up with the right numbers.
It's not guaranteed that this is actually right, but (apart from the arbitrary choice of inserted characters) it's very likely to be it.
You might want to look at chinese character encoding page on Wikipedia. The only encoding in there that I can see that is always 4 bytes is UTF-32.
GB 18030 is the current standard Chinese character set, but it can be 1 to 4 bytes long.
Try chardet. It does a good job of guessing the character encoding of a string of bytes.
Are Unicode and UTF-8 the same?
No. UTF-8 is just one way to represent Unicode characters as a sequence of bytes. Unicode is the full standard, assigning numeric and human-readable identifiers to each character, as well as lots of metadata about the characters.
It might be a valid unicode encoding, such as a utf-8 or UTF16 surrogate pair.
Yes, the Chinese one is UTF-8, a implementation (encoding) of Unicode.
The UTF-8 is 1 byte long for ASCII characters and up to 4 bytes for others.