Does CString member function CompareNoCase support other language (non-English)? - c++

I am working in Windows,using vc++2010 and MFC, in Unicode.
Following is my code:
CStringW strLowerGreek(L"αβγ");
CStringW strUpperGreek(L"ΑΒΓ");
if (0 == strLowerGreek.CompareNoCase(strUpperGreek))
AfxMessageBox(_T("Two strings are the same"));
else
AfxMessageBox(_T("Two strings are different"));
When I run the code, pop-up message is "Two strings are different".
What I wanna do is to create αβγ.txt in C disk and ΑΒΓ.txt in D disk for example(I can't create αβγ.txt and ΑΒΓ.txt in the same disk), I think αβγ.txt and ΑΒΓ.txt have the same name(not the full path,just file name), then I wanna compare the two files contents, and check them if the same.So I need a function to compare the two files name ingoring case-sensitivity.
My question are:
According to the pop-up message, CString member function CompareNoCase don't support Greek lower case and upper case. So is there something can do the work in MFC or in C++?
Is there function or library support non-English (such as Greek, Russian) upper case and lower case comparison. I wanna ingore the case sensitivity when comparing two strings.

What you have to do is set the locale. Example:
setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
CStringW strLowerGreek(L"αβγ");
CStringW strUpperGreek(L"ΑΒΓ");
int i = strLowerGreek.CompareNoCase(strUpperGreek);
CStringW strText;
strText.Format(L"%s %s %d", strLowerGreek, strUpperGreek, i);
AfxMessageBox(strText);
CStringW strLowerGreek2 = strLowerGreek.MakeUpper();
i = strLowerGreek2.CompareNoCase(strUpperGreek);
strText.Format(L"%s %s %d", strLowerGreek2, strUpperGreek, i);
AfxMessageBox(strText);
I have used the setlocale to set the locale. Initially I set it to the Greek ("ell") locale, but any locale other than the C locale works. So the more generic setlocale(LC_ALL,""); can be used to set the current locale equal to the system locale.
When I leave it with the default locale (which is English):
The return value is 32.
The text is not converted to UPPERCASE.
When I set the locale first to Greek:
The return value is 0.
The text is converted to UPPERCASE.
Result of CompareNoCase:
Result of MakeUpper:
I thought setting the locale only affected things like date formatting. But it also affects string comparisons. See the _wcsicmp reference: Call setlocale with any locale other than the C locale before the call to _wcsicmp. for additional information.

Related

Convert Japanese wstring to std::string

Can anyone suggest a good method to convert a Japanese std::wstring to std::string?
I used the below code. Japanese strings are not converting properly on an English OS.
std::string WstringTostring(std::wstring str)
{
size_t size = 0;
_locale_t lc = _create_locale(LC_ALL, "ja.JP.utf8");
errno_t err = _wcstombs_s_l(&size, NULL, 0, &str[0], _TRUNCATE, lc);
std::string ret = std::string(size, 0);
err = _wcstombs_s_l(&size, &ret[0], size, &str[0], _TRUNCATE, lc);
_free_locale(lc);
ret.resize(size-1);
return ret;
}
The wstring is "C\\files\\ブ種別.pdf".
The converted string is "C:\\files\\ブ種別.pdf".
It actually looks right to me.
That is the UTF-8-encoded version of your input (which presumably was UTF-16 before conversion), but shown in its ASCII-decoded form due to a mistake somewhere in your toolchain.
You just need to calibrate your file/terminal/display to render text output as if it were UTF-8 (which it is).
Also, remember that std::string is just a container of bytes, and does not inherently specify or imply any particular encoding. So your question is rather "how can I convert UTF-16 (containing Japanese characters) into UTF-8 in Windows" or, as it turns out, "how do I configure my terminal to display UTF-8?".
If your display for this string is the Visual Studio locals window (which you suggest is the case with your comment "I observed the value of the "ret" string in local window while debugging") you are out of luck, because VS has no idea what encoding your string is in (nor does it attempt to find out).
For other aspects of Visual Studio, though, such as the console output window, there are various approaches to work around this (example).
EDIT: some things first. Windows has the notion of the ANSI codepage. It's the default codepage of non-Unicode strings that Windows assumes. Every program that uses non-Unicode versions of Windows API, and doesn't specify the codepage explicitly, uses the ANSI codepage.
The ANSI codepage is driven by the "System default locale" setting in Control Panel. As of Windows 10 May 2020, it's under Region/Administrative/Change system locale. It takes admin rights to change that setting.
By default, Windows with the system default locale set to English uses codepage 1252 as the ANSI codepage. That codepage doesn't contain the Japanese characters. So using Japanese in Unicode unaware programs in that situation is hard or impossible.
It looks like the OP wants or has to use a piece of third part C++ code that uses multibyte strings (std::string and/or char*). That doesn't necessarily mean that it's Unicode unaware, but it might. What the OP is trying to do entirely depends on the way that third party library is coded. It might not be possible at all.
Looks like your problem is that some piece of third party code expects a file name in ANSI, and uses ANSI functions to open that file. In an English system with the default value of the system locale, Japanese can't be converted to ANSI, because the ANSI codepage (CP1252 in practice) doesn't contain the Japanese characters.
What I think you should do, you should get a short file name instead using GetShortPathNameW, convert that file path to ANSI, and pass that string. Like this:
std::string WstringFilenameTostring(std::wstring str)
{
wchar_t ShortPath[MAX_PATH+1];
DWORD dw = GetShortPathNameW(str.c_str(), ShortPath, _countof(ShortPath));
char AnsiPath[MAX_PATH+1];
int n = WideCharToMultiByte(CP_ACP, 0, ShortPath, -1, AnsiPath, _countof(AnsiPath), 0, 0);
return string(AnsiPath);
}
This code is for filenames only. For any other Japanese string, it will return nonsense. In my test, it converted "日本語.txt" to something unreadable but alphanumeric :)

Visualisation of uft-8 (Polish) not working properly

My software supports multiple languages (English, German, Polish, Russian, ...). For this reason I have some language specific files with the dialog texts in the specific language (Encoded as UTF-8).
In my mfc application I open and read those files and insert the text into my AfxMessageBoxes and other UI-Windows.
// Get the codepage number. 65001 = UTF-8
// In the real code this is a parameter in the function I call (just for clarification)
LANGID languageID = 65001;
TCHAR szCodepage[10];
GetLocaleInfo (MAKELCID (languageID, SORT_DEFAULT), LOCALE_IDEFAULTANSICODEPAGE, szCodepage, 10);
int nAnsiCodePage = _ttoi (szCodepage);
// Open the file
CFile file;
CString filename = getName();
if (!file.Open(FileName, CFile::modeRead, NULL))
{
//Check if everything is fine, else break
}
// Read the file
CString inString;
int len = file.GetLength ();
UINT n = file.Read (inString.GetBuffer(len), len);
inString.ReleaseBuffer ();
int size = MultiByteToWideChar (CP_ACP, 0, strAllItems, -1, NULL, 0);
WCHAR *ubuf = new WCHAR[size + 1];
MultiByteToWideChar ((UINT) nAnsiCodePage, (nAnsiCodePage == CP_UTF8 ?
0 : MB_PRECOMPOSED), inString, -1, ubuf, (int) size);
outString = ubuf;
file.Close ();
Result:
This mechanism is working fine for special letters of russian and german, but not for polish. I already checked the utf-8 site (http://www.utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8-table.pl?number=1024) and the polish characters are part of it.
I also checked the hex values of my CString and everything seems to be alright, but it is not visualized in the correct way. Just for testing I changed the used codepage from utf-8 to 1250 (Eastern Europe, Polish included) and it also did not work.
What am I doing wrong?
EDIT:
When I use:
MultiByteToWideChar (CP_UTF8 , 0, inString, -1, ubuf, (int) size);
The hex-values are shortend to the "best match" letters. Meaning my result is: mezczyzna
I am using windows 7 with the english language selected.
Well, you have two options:
A. Make your application Unicode. You don't tell us whether it actually is, but I conclude it's not. This is the 'best" solution technically, but it may require a lot of effort, and it may even not be feasible at all (eg use of non-Unicode libraries).
B. If your app is non-Unicode, you have some limitations:
- Your application will only be capable of displaying correctly one codepage using the non-unicode APIs & messages, and this unfortunately cannot be set per application, it's globally set in Windows with the "Language for non-Unicode programs" option, and requires a reboot.
- To display correctly strings containing characters not in the default codepage, you need to convert them to Unicode and use the "wide" versions of APIs & messages explicitly, to display them (eg MessageBoxW()). A little cumbersome, but doable, if the operation concerns only a small number of controls.
The machine you're working on has some western european language as the "Language for non-Unicode programs", and I come to this conclusion because "This mechanism is working fine for special letters of russian and german" and "Using MessageBoxA(0, "mężczyzna", 0, 0) does not work", as you said (though i'm not sure at all about russian, as it's a different codepage).
Apart from this, as IInspectable said, int size = MultiByteToWideChar (CP_ACP, 0, strAllItems, -1, NULL, 0); makes not sense at all, as the string is known to be UTF-8, and not of the default codepage. You may also need to remove the UTF-8 BOM header, if your file contains it.

Printing em-dash to console window using printf? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Is it possible to cout an EM DASH on Linux and Windows? [duplicate]
(2 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
A simple problem: I'm writing a chatroom program in C++ (but it's primarily C-style) for a class, and I'm trying to print, “#help — display a list of commands...” to the output window. While I could use two hyphens (--) to achieve roughly the same effect, I'd rather use an em-dash (—). printf(), however, doesn't seem to support printing em-dashes. Instead, the console just prints out the character, ù, in its place, despite the fact that entering em-dashes directly into the prompt works fine.
How do I get this simple Unicode character to show up?
Looking at Windows alt key codes, I find it interesting how alt+0151 is "—" and alt+151 is "ù". Is this related to my problem, or a simple coincidence?
the windows is unicode (UTF-16) system. console unicode as well. if you want print unicode text - you need (and this is most effective) use WriteConsoleW
BOOL PrintString(PCWSTR psz)
{
DWORD n;
return WriteConsoleW(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), psz, (ULONG)wcslen(psz), &n, 0);
}
PrintString(L"—");
in this case in your binary file will be wide character — (2 bytes 0x2014) and console print it as is.
if ansi (multi-byte) function is called for output console - like WriteConsoleA or WriteFile - console first translate multi-byte string to unicode via MultiByteToWideChar and in place CodePage will be used value returned by GetConsoleOutputCP. and here (translation) can be problem if you use characters > 0x80
first of all compiler can give you warning: The file contains a character that cannot be represented in the current code page (number). Save the file in Unicode format to prevent data loss. (C4819). but even after you save source file in Unicode format, can be next:
wprintf(L"ù"); // no warning
printf("ù"); //warning C4566
because L"ù" saved as wide char string (as is) in binary file - here all ok and no any problems and warning. but "ù" is saved as char string (single byte string). compiler need convert wide string "ù" from source file to multi-byte string in binary (.obj file, from which linker create pe than). and compiler use for this WideCharToMultiByte with CP_ACP (The current system default Windows ANSI code page.)
so what happens if you say call printf("ù"); ?
unicode string "ù" will be converted to multi-byte
WideCharToMultiByte(CP_ACP, ) and this will be at compile time. resulting multi-byte string will be saved in binary file
the console it run-time convert your multi-byte string to
wide char by MultiByteToWideChar(GetConsoleOutputCP(), ..) and
print this string
so you got 2 conversions: unicode -> CP_ACP -> multi-byte -> GetConsoleOutputCP() -> unicode
by default GetConsoleOutputCP() == CP_OEMCP != CP_ACP even if you run program on computer where you compile it. (on another computer with another CP_OEMCP especially)
problem in incompatible conversions - different code pages used. but even if you change console code page to your CP_ACP - convertion anyway can wrong translate some characters.
and about CRT api wprintf - here situation is next:
the wprintf first convert given string from unicode to multi-byte by using it internal current locale (and note that crt locale independent and different from console locale). and then call WriteFile with multi-byte string. console convert back this multi-bytes string to unicode
unicode -> current_crt_locale -> multi-byte -> GetConsoleOutputCP() -> unicode
so for use wprintf we need first set current crt locale to GetConsoleOutputCP()
char sz[16];
sprintf(sz, ".%u", GetConsoleOutputCP());
setlocale(LC_ALL, sz);
wprintf(L"—");
but anyway here i view (on my comp) - on screen instead —. so will be -— if call PrintString(L"—"); (which used WriteConsoleW) just after this.
so only reliable way print any unicode characters (supported by windows) - use WriteConsoleW api.
After going through the comments, I've found eryksun's solution to be the simplest (...and the most comprehensible):
#include <stdio.h>
#include <io.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
int main()
{
//other stuff
_setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_U16TEXT);
wprintf(L"#help — display a list of commands...");
Portability isn't a concern of mine, and this solves my initial problem—no more ù—my beloved em-dash is on display.
I acknowledge this question is essentially a duplicate of the one linked by sata300.de. Albeit, with printf in the place of cout, and unnecessary ramblings in the place of relevant information.

Can I point the necessary codepage for the individual string variable in the `Watch1` window?

Visual Studio 2015, C++ language, debugging.
In the Watch1 window I look the values of my variables (strings) of the wchar_t* and char* types. The first of them is Unicode and the second is ANSI (CP_OEMCP codepage). In the Watch1 window the text of the wchar_t* variable is displaying correctly, but the text of the char* variable is displaying unreadable. Can I point the necessary codepage for the individual string variable in the Watch1 window? I want to see both values of my strings correctly in the Watch1 window.
Maybe for such cases is exists the some syntax, similar the $err,hr (the text of the last error, which was gotten via the GetLastError() function).
UPD (the screen added)
Console window has the right output, but in the memory and in the Watch1 window I see unreadable string for my ansiText variable.
The problem is that the original string (starting with hex values 8D A0 A6) is not on Windows-1251 (Windows Cyrillic) code page, but on OEM 866 code page. These two are different, and Visual Studio expects Windows-1251, because that's system's code page (code page used for non-Unicode applications).
It is not possible to specify a code page when you watch a string in debugger. Everything inside should be Unicode anyway, or at least UTF-8, and for those two there are format specifiers, su and s8. See MSDN for all format specifiers.
What you can do is have the following function integrated in the code, and when you want to see some non-ANSI (or non-CP_ACP, to be precise) string just call this function with the string and code page as parameters (but use the function only once in Watch window):
LPCWSTR ViewString(LPCSTR szString, UINT nCodePage)
{
static WCHAR szTemp[1024];
MultiByteToWideChar(nCodePage, 0, szString, -1, szTemp, 1024);
return szTemp;
}
So, in your case in Watch window instead of (char*)ansiText there would be ViewString(ansiText, 866). Also, note that this is not actually "ANSI text", but "OEM text".
I don't know what exactly your program is supposed to do, but I would convert all non-Unicode strings to Unicode at the earliest point in code (right where you get a non-Unicode string), and in your code always work just with Unicode strings. To convert OEM 866 string to Unicode you can use function MultiByteToWideChar with CodePage parameter = 866.

Storing and retrieving UTF-8 strings from Windows resource (RC) files

I created an RC file which contains a string table, I would like to use some special
characters: ö ü ó ú ő ű á é. so I save the string with UTF-8 encoding.
But when I call in my cpp file, something like this:
LoadString("hu.dll", 12, nn, MAX_PATH);
I get a weird result:
How do I solve this problem?
As others have pointed out in the comments, the Windows APIs do not provide direct support for UTF-8 encoded text. You cannot pass the MessageBox function UTF-8 encoded strings and get the output that you expect. It will, instead, interpret them as characters in your local code page.
To get a UTF-8 string to pass to the Windows API functions (including MessageBox), you need to use the MultiByteToWideChar function to convert from UTF-8 to UTF-16 (what Windows calls Unicode, or wide strings). Passing the CP_UTF8 flag for the first parameter is the magic that enables this conversion. Example:
std::wstring ConvertUTF8ToUTF16String(const char* pszUtf8String)
{
// Determine the size required for the destination buffer.
const int length = MultiByteToWideChar(CP_UTF8,
0, // no flags required
pszUtf8String,
-1, // automatically determine length
nullptr,
0);
// Allocate a buffer of the appropriate length.
std::wstring utf16String(length, L'\0');
// Call the function again to do the conversion.
if (!MultiByteToWideChar(CP_UTF8,
0,
pszUtf8String,
-1,
&utf16String[0],
length))
{
// Uh-oh! Something went wrong.
// Handle the failure condition, perhaps by throwing an exception.
// Call the GetLastError() function for additional error information.
throw std::runtime_error("The MultiByteToWideChar function failed");
}
// Return the converted UTF-16 string.
return utf16String;
}
Then, once you have a wide string, you will explicitly call the wide-string variant of the MessageBox function, MessageBoxW.
However, if you only need to support Windows and not other platforms that use UTF-8 everywhere, you will probably have a much easier time sticking exclusively with UTF-16 encoded strings. This is the native Unicode encoding that Windows uses, and you can pass these types of strings directly to any of the Windows API functions. See my answer here to learn more about the interaction between Windows API functions and strings. I recommend the same thing to you as I did to the other guy:
Stick with wchar_t and std::wstring for your characters and strings, respectively.
Always call the W variants of Windows API functions, including LoadStringW and MessageBoxW.
Ensure that the UNICODE and _UNICODE macros are defined either before you include any of the Windows headers or in your project's build settings.