I have an array of approximately 400 UTF-8 bytes. How can I display the corresponding text? It almost certainly contains several emojis, along with ASCII.
Platform is Windows with Visual C++, but I can switch to macOS or Linux if necessary. Happy to use a 3rd party library too.
Clarification: It's a console application, so I'd like to display the result in a console. I can use Windows Terminal instead. Looks like MultiByteToWideChar is what I need.
Related
We have an MFC Windows Application, written originally in VC++ 6 and over the years updated for newer IDE, currently developed in VS2017.
The application is built with MBCS (not unicode). Trying to switch to Unicode causes 3806 compile errors, and that is probably just a tip of an iceberg.
However we want to be able to run the application with different code page, ie. 1250 (Central European).
I tried to build a small test application, and managed to get it to work with special characters (čćšđž). I did this by setting dialog font to Microsoft Sans Serif with code page 1250.
The same approach in our application does not work. Note: dialogs in our application are created dynamically, and font is set using SetFont.
There is a difference how the special characters are treated in these two applications.
In test application, the special characters are displayed in the edit control, and GetWindowsText retrieves the right bytes. However, trying to write some characters from other languages, renders them as "????".
In our application, all special characters are rendered properly, but GetWindowText (or WM_GETTEXT) convert the special characters to the similar ascii counterpart (čćđ -> ccd).
I believe that Edit control in our application displays Unicode text, but GetWindowText converts it to ascii.
Does anyone have any idea what is happening here, and how I might solve it?
Note: I know how to convert project to Unicode. We are choosing not to commit resources to it at the moment, as it would probably take weeks or months to implement. The question is how I might get it to work with MBSC and why is edit control converting Č to C.
I believe it is absolutely possible to port the application to other languages/codepages, you only need to modify the .rc (resource) files, basically having one resource file for each language, which you may rather want to do anyway, as strings in menus and/or string-tables would be in a different language. And this is actually the only change needed, as far as the application part is concerned.
The other part is the system you are running it on. A window can be unicode or non-unicode. You can see this with the Spyxx utility, it tells you whether a window (procedure) is unicode or not (Window properties, General tab). And while unicode windows do work properly, non-unicode ones have to change encoding from/to unicode and mbcs when getting or setting the text. The conversion is based on the system (default) code-page. This can only be set globally (for the whole machine), and not per application or window. And of course, setting the font's codepage is not enough (and imo it's not needed at all, if you are runnign the application on a machine with the "correct" codepage). That is, for non-unicode applications, only one codepage will be working properly, the others won't.
I can see two options:
If you only need to update a small number of controls, it may be possible to change only these controls to unicode, and use the "wide" versions of the get/set window-test functions or messages - you will have to convert the text between unicode and your desired codepage. It requires writing some code, but has the advantage of the conversion being independent from the system default codepage, eg you can have the codepage in some configuration file, in the registry, or as a command-line option (in the application's shortcut). Some control types can be changed to unicode, some others not, so pls check the documentation. Used this technique successfully for a mbcs application displaying/editing translated strings in many different languages, but I only had one control, a List-View, which btw offers the LVM_SETUNICODEFORMAT message, thus allowing for unicode texts, even in a mbcs application.
The easiest method is simply run the application as is, but it will only be working on machines with the proper default codepage, as most non-unicode applications do.
The system default codepage can be changed by setting the "Language for non-Unicode programs" option, available in the regional settings, Administrative tab, and requires a reboot. Changing the Windows UI language will change this option as well, but by setting this option you don't need to change the UI language, eg you can have English UI and East-European codepage.
See a very similar post here.
Late to the party:
In our application, all special characters are rendered properly, but GetWindowText (or WM_GETTEXT) convert the special characters to the similar ascii counterpart (čćđ -> ccd).
That sounds like the ES_OEMCONVERT flag has been set for the control:
Converts text entered in the edit control. The text is converted from the Windows character set to the OEM character set and then back to the Windows character set. This ensures proper character conversion when the application calls the CharToOem function to convert a Windows string in the edit control to OEM characters. This style is most useful for edit controls that contain file names that will be used on file systems that do not support Unicode.
To change this style after the control has been created, use SetWindowLong.
I'm trying to display text in my CListCtrl for the last several hours with no success.
I'm using std::ifstream to read from .txt file that uses utf-8 to populate the CListCtrl.
"Project properties->Character" set is "not set" and I can't change it to use Unicode, this is an old project originally not written by me.
Also conversion from UTF-8 to ANSI doesn't work, and I can't use boost libraries.
As I read the CListCtrl doesn't support UTF-8.
I will be glad to hear any solution that might work, Extended CListCtrl to replace the old one etc.. I am using VS2010, .NET4.
You need to use the Unicode version of list view APIs (e.g. LVM_SETITEMW). The MBCS version of MFC calls the ANSI versions of Windows APIs which may not be able to display some Unicode characters in your file.
This means you need to send a LVM_SETITEMW message with a LVITEMW structure if you want to change an item, for example. If you have many list controls to change, you can probably write a CListCtrlW class using MFC's code as reference. LVITEMW expects strings to be UTF-16, so you need to convert the string data to UTF-16. You can do this via MultiByteToWideChar or CA2W with the CP_UTF8 code page. Also if you are using a font that cannot handle some Unicode characters from your input, you need to change the font.
If a lot of places in the UI are required to handle Unicode input, you can try move the ANSI part of the business logic out to a DLL then change your main exe project to Unicode.
I am finishing application in Visual C++/Windows API and I am using MySql C Connector.
Whole application code uses ANSI, MySql C Connector is in ANSI too.
This program will be used on Polish and German computers with Windows XP/Vista/7 or 8.
I want to correcly display german umlauts and polish accent characters on:
DialogBox controls (strings are loaded from language files)
Generated XHTML documents
Strings retrieved from MySql database displayed on controls and in XHTML documents
I have heard about MultiByteToWideChar and Unicode functions (MessageBoxW etc.), but application code is nearly finished, converting is a lot of work...
How to make character encoding correctly with the least work and time?
Maybe changing system code page for non-Unicode program?
First, of course: what code set is MySQL returning? Or perhaps:
what code set was used when writing the data into the data base?
Other than that, I don't think you'll be able to avoid using
either wide characters or multibyte characters: for single byte
characters, German would use ISO 8859-1 (code page 1252) or
ISO 8859-15, Polish ISO 8859-2 (code page 1250). But what are
you doing with the characters in your own code? You may be able
to get away with UTF-8 (code page 65001), without many changes.
The real question is where the characters originally come from
(although it might not be too difficult to translate them into
UTF-8 immediately at the source); I don't think that Windows
respects the code page for input.
Although it doesn't help you much to know it, you're dealing
with an almost impossible problem, since so much depends on
things outside your program: things like the encoding of the
display font, or the keyboard driver, for example. In fact,
it's not rare for programs to display one thing on the screen,
and something different when outputting to the printer, or to
display one thing on the screen, but something different if the
data is written to a file, and read with another program. The
situation is improving—modern Unix and the Internet are
gradually (very gradually) standardizing on UTF-8, everywhere
and for everything, and Windows normally uses UTF-16 for
everything that is pure Windows (but needs to support UTF-8 for
the Internet). But even using the platform standard won't help
if the human client has installed (and is using) fonts which
don't have the characters you need.
The Subversion API has a number of functions for converting from "natively-encoded" strings to strings that are encoded in UTF-8. My question is: what is this native encoding on Windows? Does it depend on locale?
"Natively encoded" strings are strings written in whatever code page the user is using. That is, they are numbers that are translated to the appropriate glyphs based on the correct code page. Assuming the file was saved that way and not as a UTF-8 file.
This is a candidate question for Joel's article on Unicode.
Specifically:
Eventually this OEM free-for-all got
codified in the ANSI standard. In the
ANSI standard, everybody agreed on
what to do below 128, which was pretty
much the same as ASCII, but there were
lots of different ways to handle the
characters from 128 and on up,
depending on where you lived. These
different systems were called code
pages. So for example in Israel DOS
used a code page called 862, while
Greek users used 737. They were the
same below 128 but different from 128
up, where all the funny letters
resided. The national versions of
MS-DOS had dozens of these code pages,
handling everything from English to
Icelandic and they even had a few
"multilingual" code pages that could
do Esperanto and Galician on the same
computer! Wow! But getting, say,
Hebrew and Greek on the same computer
was a complete impossibility unless
you wrote your own custom program that
displayed everything using bitmapped
graphics, because Hebrew and Greek
required different code pages with
different interpretations of the high
numbers.
Windows 1252. Jukka Korpela has an excellent page on character encodings, with an extensive discussion of the Windows character set.
From the header svn_string.h you can see that the relevant svn_strings are just plain old const char* + a length element.
I would guess that the "natively encoded" svn strings are interpreted according to your system locale (I do not know this for sure, but this is the convention). On Windows 7 you can check your locale by selecting "Start-->Control Panel-->Region and Language-->Administrative-->Change system locale" where any value of English would probably entail the character encoding Windows 1252. However, a different system locale, for example Hebrew (Israel), would entail a different character encoding (Windows 1255 for the case of Hebrew).
Sadly the MSVC version of the C library does not support UTF-8 and uses legacy codepages only, but cygwin provides a UTF-8 locale as part of its emulation layer. If your svn is built on cygwin, you should be able to use UTF-8 just fine.
I am working on a translation application in which users are allowed to give English input and I need to convert to a target language and display on a text box. I am facing problems in displaying unicode characters.
Complex characters are not rendering correctly. I know windows uses Uniscribe for rendering complex characters. So do I need to use that explicitly to get the correct rendering? What is the equivalent of Uniscribe in LINUX and MAC?
I am using C++ with wxWidgets framework and trying to display unicode characters on a text box. Any help would be great!
Considering that Uniscribe support in wxWidgets was merely a Google Summer of code idea this year, it seems unlikely that it's working today.
There's no trivial Linux or Mac equivalent for Uniscribe
Read up on Pango. It's the library that supports full OpenType rendering on Linux. Mac's another story.