The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Encoding’ Category

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Regular expressions and the ASP.NET RegularExpressionValidator control – an overview of useful links

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/10

Every now and then I need the ASP.NET RegularExpressionValidator control to validate some user input on a web-page using .NET Regular Expressions (which are very similar to regular expressions used in other languages and frameworks).

Somehow, I have lost loads of time because many of the hits on Google show up high in the results, but do not actually help that much.

So I decided to put up a bunch of links to pages that I think are relevant, or helped me much.
This list is not definitive: please comment when you have links to better information!

Note: this list is current at the instant of the latest edit timestamp: tools might have improved (or disappeared) since then.
Opnions are mine; if you do not agree: please convince me why.

Tools

Regular Expression builder applications

  • Expresso – free .NET WinForms application to visually build and test regular expressions (free registraion required after 60 days of trial usage)
  • RegexWorkbench – free .NET WinForms application to build and test regular expressions (much more rudimentary than Expresso)

Regular Expression test applications

  • RegexLib tester – free on-line regular expresion tester where you can choose the client platform (.NET/ClientSide/SilverLight)
  • The Regulator – free .NET WinForms application to test regular expressions with built in support for RegexLib.com
  • The Regex Coach – free LISP Windows application to test regular expressions and tries to explain them in plain english
  • RegExPal – free on-line JavaScript regular expression tester (tests the client side only)
  • ReWork – free on-line JavaScript tester with samples in JavaScript/PHP/Python/Ruby
  • RegexDesigner.NET – free .NET WinForms application to test regular expressions and generate C#/VB.NET code from them (ot really a “Designer” after all and much less sophisticated than The Regulator)

Tools lists

Tools not worth looking at

  • Regulazy – too rudimentary

Sites/Documentation/Examples

Some comments on common regular expression solutions

  • RegEx for email usuaully reject valid email adresses like jeroen+info@pluimers.subdomain.info
    Dominic has some very nice info on validating email adresses
  • RegEx for a minimum number of characters usually contain \w, which is not any character!
    Better use ^(.{6,})$ than ^(\w{6,})$ if you want a minimum length of 6 characters.

Bugs

Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, Development, Encoding, JavaScript/ECMAScript, LISP, RegEx, Scripting, Software Development, Unicode, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

CodeRage 4: session “Practical XML in Delphi” chat and Q&A transcripts

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/09

Not only can you download CodeRage 4 session on materials on Practical XML in Delphi, but below you can also find the chat transcripts below.

Note the times are a bit odd: when the chat window refreshes, it sometimes uses the PST time zone, but new posts are using the local time zone.
Hence the sudden jump from 9 AM to  almost 6 PM.

VIP Room Transcript with Q&A

[5:46:28 PM] <davidi>

Q: thomasgrubb asked: “Is there an implementation for XMLDocument (for Delphi Win32) that is file-mapped, e.g., the whole doc is not loaded into memory?”
A: Not that Jeroen is aware of.
[5:46:54 PM] <davidi>

Q: thomasgrubb asked: “Is there an implementation for XMLDocument (for Delphi Win32) that is file-mapped, e.g., the whole doc is not loaded into memory?”
A: Not that Jeroen is aware of. Send Jeroen an email and he will blog about other solutions.
[5:47:20 PM] <davidi>

Q: thomasgrubb asked: “For Embarcadero Technologies: Are you going to develop a better option for validating XML on the Win32 side in the future?”
A: David I – replied – I will forward this to R&D and Product management
[5:53:14 PM] <davidi>

Q: devtux asked: “are you using any XML test generator? Please, suggest one if yes”
A: XMLSpy
[5:53:47 PM] <davidi>

Q: richz asked: “I’ve been trying for weeks to find out how to have the Win32 Delphi IDE generate code to serialize/de-serialize my class properties to an XML file. Is there anything in the IDE to do that?”
A: From Delphi 2010 on – you can use DBX support for JSON!

Public Room Transcript

[7:58:58 AM] * Christine_Ellis has set the topic to: Session Room 2 – Next Session”Practical XML in Delphi” at 8AM PDT
[8:02:15 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> Starting livemeeting
[8:03:59 AM] * Jeroen_Pluimers is wondering why LiveMeeting is always asking for email/company. Does it suffer from Korsakov’s disease?
[8:07:34 AM] <Christine_Ellis> It asks because we tell it to.
[8:08:22 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> but it never remembers, even if you start it with the same session parametes.
[8:08:41 AM] <Christine_Ellis> live meeting doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t know who you are
[8:08:47 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> ok.
[8:09:29 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> can we do a quick audio test?
[8:12:48 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> I mean: fro my current Microphone; it works with sound recorder, but wonder if Live Meeting will get it today as well.
[8:15:55 AM] * Christine_Ellis has set the topic to: Session Room 2 – “Practical XML in Delphi“
[8:35:37 AM] <Peter_Wolf> a lot of memory = usually 10 timer more than the size of XML file bytes
[8:36:27 AM] <Peter_Wolf> … the size of XML file in bytes
[8:39:14 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> @Peter: that totally depends on what you use to read that XML. The MSXML and Internet Explorer are notorous memory hogs. But .NET is much more efficient on memory usage.
[8:40:15 AM] <Peter_Wolf> i ment MSXML which is default for most users
[8:41:17 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> @Peter: yup, that’s why I mentioned that as the first one. Most of the Win32 users will use MSXML, because that is the default for Win32.
[8:43:45 AM] * Jeroen_Pluimers warns: be carefull where you press ESC in IE: it can unload your chat window.
[8:47:29 AM] <Scott_Hollows> my brain hurts
[8:48:57 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> Scott: let me know later on if I can make it more clear to you.
[8:50:27 AM] <Ryan_Ford> Will this presentation be available for download?
[8:51:05 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> @Ryan: yes it will.
[8:52:59 AM] <Ryan_Ford> Its so nice to run 8GB for development
[8:52:59 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> @Ryan: the session materials are available for download here: https://wiert.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/coderage-4-session-materials-available-for-download/ The replays will be available for download after the conference.
[8:58:56 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> My VIP room died.
[9:00:08 AM] <AbsaLootly> … you have to hate it when that happens…
[9:01:46 AM] <Ryan_Ford> What alternatives for MSXML are there for WIN32
[9:02:22 AM] <Peter_Wolf> it also takes forever to open really big XML files wh MSXML
[5:45:31 PM] <AbsaLootly> I saw one developer try to put an entire database in one xml file… it took several hours to load it.
[5:51:59 PM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> MSXML
[5:52:03 PM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> ADOM XML
[5:52:05 PM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> Xerces
[5:52:56 PM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> That straight from the Delphi 2010 TXMLDocument.DOMVendor property
[5:53:25 PM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> XMLSpy can generate test ML
[5:54:16 PM] <Rich__> Thx
[5:55:17 PM] <Jim_Ferguson> Can you briefly describe JSON?
[5:56:02 PM] <Jim_Ferguson> what tool do you use transcribe your chat?
[5:56:23 PM] <Jon> it’s called a keyboard :)

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, CodeRage, CommandLine, Conferences, Database Development, Debugging, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Event, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Prism, Software Development, Source Code Management, TFS (Team Foundation System), UTF-8, UTF8, Visual Studio and tools, XML, XML/XSD, XSD | Leave a Comment »

CodeRage 4: session materials are available for download« The Wiert Corner – Jeroen Pluimers’ irregular stream of Wiert stuff

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/09

My CodeRage 4 session materials are available for download:

CodeRage 4 is a free, virtual conference on Embarcadero technologies with a lot of Delphi sessions.
It is held from September 8 till 11, 2009, i.e. while I write this :-)
If you want to watch sessions live, be sure to register through LiveMeeting (the technology they use for making this all happen).

Let me know if you download, and what you are using the sample code for.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, CodeRage, CommandLine, Conferences, Database Development, Debugging, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Event, Firebird, InterBase, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Prism, Software Development, Source Code Management, SQL Server, TFS (Team Foundation System), Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8, Visual Studio and tools, XML, XML/XSD, XSD | 4 Comments »

CodeRage 4: sessions recorded; Delphi 2010 migration was a beeze; samples/slides will be uploaded soon

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/05

I just finished recording my CodeRage 4 sessions:

  • Practical XML in Delphi
  • Reliable Communication between Applications with Delphi and ActiveMQ
  • Using Unicode and Other Encodings in your Programs

CodeRage 4 is a free, virtual conference on Embarcadero technologies with a lot of Delphi sessions.
It is held from September 8 till 11, 2009, i.e. next week :-)
If you want to watch sessions live, be sure to register through LiveMeeting (the technology they use for making this all happen).

This week, I found some time do migrate all the sample projects to the release versions of Delphi Win32 2010 and Delphi Prism 2010.

Delphi Win32 2010 works like a charm: it is much faster and has a much smaller footprint than any other Galileo based IDE.
In fact, it feels almost as fast as the pre-Galileo based IDE’s.
With the added benefit that all the new features make me much more productive, not the least because it has not yet crashed on me this week once.
Crashing has been a frequent thing on me since Delphi 4 (maybe I should not even mention that number ), for most IDE’s at least a couple of times a week, so this is good.

Delphi Prism 2010 works really nice too, it is rock solid, and the language as some great features not found in other .NET languages.
But it still needs a tiny bit more polishing on the Visual Studio IDE Integration part.
There are a few things not as smoothly integrated as I’m used to in C# and VB .NET (for instance when adding assembly references; C# and VB.NET allow you to do that from multiple places in the IDE; Delphi Prism from only one).
I know it is nitpicking (the same holds for the Team Foundation System integration in the Visual Studio IDE: ever tried to add files or folders? There is only one icon that allows you to do it. Ever tried to move files or folders around? No way you can drag & drop, in fact you can move only 1 file or folder at a time, and then the folder tree leaves you at the target).

The Embarcadero folks have worked hard on developer productivity in the Delphi Win32 2010 IDE.
(Did I mention the F6 key? It is an awesome way of directly jumping into configuration dialogs a zillion levels deep.
Did I mention the Ctrl-D key? It instantly reformats your source code to your formatting settings).
So maybe it is now time to put some of that effort into the Prism side as well.

Back to my CodeRage sessions: the recordings are done, they will soon become available as downloads together with the samples/slides.

Keep watching :-)

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Database Development, Debugging, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Event, Firebird, InterBase, Java, Package Development, Prism, Software Development, Source Code Management, TFS (Team Foundation System), Unicode, Visual Studio and tools, XML, XML/XSD, XSD | Leave a Comment »

StUF – receiving data from a provider where UTF-8 is in fact ISO-8859

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/05/08

Recently when receiving information from a StUF webservice created by a large Dutch provider of government IT systems, we had an issue with characters having their high bit set.

Although the web-service pretended to send their information as UTF-8, in fact they were encoding using a form of ISO_8859.

The most likely character set they used is ISO-8859-1 (since that is the default encoding for the HTTP protocol), but it might also be ISO-8859-15 which is an adaption of ISO-8859-1 trading some typographic characters for the euro-sign and some characters from French and some characters used for transliteration of  Russian, Finnish and Estonian.
(note that the printable characters of both ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15 can be displayed by the Windows-1252 code page)

Since it is not possible to reliably “guess” the right encoding (there are way to many possibilities, even IsTextUnicode that is used by Notepad fails, see below), the only way is to use a fixed reencoding that depends on the StUF data provider. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Encoding, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Mojibake, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8, Windows Development, XML, XML/XSD | 5 Comments »

.NET/C# – converting UTF8 to ASCII (yes, you *can* loose information with this) using System.Text.Encoding

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/04/23

Quite a while ago, we needed to exchange some text files with .NET and a DOS application (yes, they still exist!).

Since the .NET app already exchanged text files with other applications using UTF8, we had to reencode those into plain ASCII.
(yes, I am aware there are dozens of codepages we could encode to, we decided to stick with 7-bit ASCII, and warned the client about possible information loss).

A couple of months later, we neede to exchange information with an app doing Windows-1252, and then even later on to a web-app needing ISO 8859-1 (both are Western European encodings).
So I decided to refactor the UTF8 to ASCII conversion app into something more maintainable.

But first let me show you how you can dump all of the .NET supported encodings:
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, ASCII, C#, Development, Encoding, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8 | 3 Comments »

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