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

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Archive for the ‘UTF16’ Category

C# Effective way to find any file’s Encoding – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/09

Note: notepad cannot correctly guess the encoding, see the “old new thing”: [Wayback] Some files come up strange in Notepad | The Old New Thing (talking about ANSI a.k.a. Windows-1252, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, UTF-8, UTF-7 somewith and some without BOM as Notepad does not understand all permutations)

David Cumps discovered that certain text files come up strange in Notepad. The reason is that Notepad has to edit files in a variety of encodings, and when its back against the wall, sometimes it’s forced to guess.

[Wayback] C# Effective way to find any file’s Encoding – Stack Overflow shows how to detect various byte order marks in C#.

–jeroen

Posted in ASCII, Development, Encoding, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-32, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF32, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »

PowerShell error in a script but not on the console: The string is missing the terminator: “.

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/09/29

The below one will fail in a script, both both work from the PowerShell prompt:

Success

Get-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "File and Printer Sharing" | ForEach-Object { Write-Host $_.DisplayName ; Get-NetFirewallAddressFilter -AssociatedNetFirewallRule $_ }

Failure

Get-NetFirewallRule –DisplayGroup "File and Printer Sharing" | ForEach-Object { Write-Host $_.DisplayName ; Get-NetFirewallAddressFilter -AssociatedNetFirewallRule $_ }

The error you get this this:

At C:\bin\Show-File-and-Printer-Sharing-firewall-rules.ps1:5 char:52
+ ... -TCP-NoScope" | ForEach-Object { Write-Host $_.DisplayName ; Get-NetF ...
+                 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The string is missing the terminator: ".
    + CategoryInfo          : ParserError: (:) [], ParentContainsErrorRecordException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : TerminatorExpectedAtEndOfString

Via [WayBack] script file ‘The string is missing the terminator: “.’ – Google Search, I quickly found these that stood out:

Cause and solution

Before DisplayGroup, the first line has a minus sign and the second an en-dash. You can see this via [WayBack] What Unicode character is this ?.

Apparently, when using Unicode on the console, it does not matter if you have a minus sign (-), en-dash (–), em-dash (—) or horizontal bar (―) as dash character. You can see this in [WayBack] tokenizer.cs at function [WayBack] NextToken and [WayBack] CharTraits.cs at function [WayBack] IsChar).

When saving to a non-Unicode file, it does matter, even though it does not display as garbage in the error message.

Similarly, PowerShell has support for these special characters:

    internal static class SpecialChars
    {
        // Uncommon whitespace
        internal const char NoBreakSpace = (char)0x00a0;
        internal const char NextLine = (char)0x0085;

        // Special dashes
        internal const char EnDash = (char)0x2013;
        internal const char EmDash = (char)0x2014;
        internal const char HorizontalBar = (char)0x2015;

        // Special quotes
        internal const char QuoteSingleLeft = (char)0x2018; // left single quotation mark
        internal const char QuoteSingleRight = (char)0x2019; // right single quotation mark
        internal const char QuoteSingleBase = (char)0x201a; // single low-9 quotation mark
        internal const char QuoteReversed = (char)0x201b; // single high-reversed-9 quotation mark
        internal const char QuoteDoubleLeft = (char)0x201c; // left double quotation mark
        internal const char QuoteDoubleRight = (char)0x201d; // right double quotation mark
        internal const char QuoteLowDoubleLeft = (char)0x201E; // low double left quote used in german.
    }

The easiest solution is to use minus signs everywhere.

Another solution is to save files as Unicode UTF-8 encoding (preferred) or UTF-16 encoding (which I dislike).

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Development, Encoding, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »

UTF-8 support for single byte character sets is beta in Windows and likely breaks a lot of applications not expecting this (via Unicode in Microsoft Windows: UTF-8 – Wikipedia)

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/12/04

Uh-oh: [WayBack] Unicode in Microsoft Windows: UTF-8 – Wikipedia:

Microsoft Windows has a code page designated for UTF-8code page 65001. Prior to Windows 10 insider build 17035 (November 2017),[7] it was impossible to set the locale code page to 65001, leaving this code page only available for:

  • Explicit conversion functions such as MultiByteToWideChar
  • The Win32 console command chcp 65001 to translate stdin/out between UTF-8 and UTF-16.

This means that “narrow” functions, in particular fopen, cannot be called with UTF-8 strings, and in fact there is no way to open all possible files using fopen no matter what the locale is set to and/or what bytes are put in the string, as none of the available locales can produce all possible UTF-16 characters.

On all modern non-Windows platforms, the string passed to fopen is effectively UTF-8. This produces an incompatibility between other platforms and Windows. The normal work-around is to add Windows-specific code to convert UTF-8 to UTF-16 using MultiByteToWideChar and call the “wide” function.[8] Conversion is also needed even for Windows-specific api such as SetWindowText since many applications inherently have to use UTF-8 due to its use in file formats, internet protocols, and its ability to interoperate with raw arrays of bytes.

There were proposals to add new API to portable libraries such as Boost to do the necessary conversion, by adding new functions for opening and renaming files. These functions would pass filenames through unchanged on Unix, but translate them to UTF-16 on Windows.[9] This would allow code to be “portable”, but required just as many code changes as calling the wide functions.

With insider build 17035 and the April 2018 update (nominal build 17134) for Windows 10, a “Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support” checkbox appeared for setting the locale code page to UTF-8.[a] This allows for calling “narrow” functions, including fopen and SetWindowTextA, with UTF-8 strings. Microsoft claims this option might break some functions (a possible example is _mbsrev[10]) as they were written to assume multibyte encodings used no more than 2 bytes per character, thus until now code pages with more bytes such as GB 18030 (cp54936) and UTF-8 could not be set as the locale.[11]


  1. Jump up^ [WayBack“UTF-8 in Windows”Stack Overflow. Retrieved July 1, 2011.
  2. Jump up^ [WayBack“Boost.Nowide”.
  3. Jump up^ [WayBackhttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/reference/strrev-wcsrev-mbsrev-mbsrev-l
  4. Jump up^ [WayBack“Code Page Identifiers (Windows)”msdn.microsoft.com.

Via [WayBack] Microsoft Windows Beta UTF-8 support for Ansi API could break things. Wiki Article of the Change… – Tommi Prami – Google+

Related, as handling encoding is hard, especially if it is changed or not your default:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, C, C++, Delphi, Development, Encoding, GB 18030, Power User, Software Development, UTF-16, UTF-32, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF32, UTF8, Windows, Windows 10 | 2 Comments »

Long read about Unicode: You, Me And The Emoji: Character Sets, Encoding And Emoji – Smashing Magazine

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/11/07

A well worth long rad:

We all recognize emoji. They’ve become the global pop stars of digital communication. But what are they, technically speaking? And what might we learn by taking a closer look at these images, characters, pictographs… whatever they are 🤔 (Thinking Face). We will dig deep to learn about how these thingamajigs work. Please note: Depending on your browser, you may not be able to see all emoji featured in this article (especially the Tifinagh characters). Also, different platforms vary in how they display emoji as well. That’s why the article always provides textual alternatives. Don’t let it discourage you from reading though! Now, let’s start with a seemingly simple question. What are emoji?

[WayBackYou, Me And The Emoji: Character Sets, Encoding And Emoji – Smashing Magazine

Via: [WayBack] Everything you ever wanted to know about characters, encodings, glyphs… and, oh yeah, emoji: bit.ly/2fNKeW3Long, rewarding read. – Ilya Grigorik – Google+

Here is just the ToC:

TABLE OF CONTENTS LINK

  1. Character Sets And Document Encoding: An Overview
    1. Characters
    2. Character Sets
    3. Coded Character Sets
    4. Encoding
  2. Declaring Character Sets And Document Encoding On The Web
    1. content-type HTTP Header Declaration
    2. Checking HTTP Headers Using A Browser’s Developer Tools
    3. Checking HTTP Headers Using Web-based Tools
    4. Using A Meta Element With charset Attribute
    5. An Encoding By Any Other Name
  3. What Were We Talking About Again? Oh Yeah, Emoji!
    1. So What Are Emoji?
    2. How Do We Use Emoji?
    3. Character References
    4. Glyphs
    5. How Do We Know If We Have These Symbols?
    6. The Great Emoji Proliferation Of 2016
  4. Emoji OS Support
    1. Emoji Support: Apple Platforms (macOS and iOS)
    2. Emoji Support: Windows
    3. Emoji Support: Linux
    4. Emoji Support: Android
  5. Emoji On The Web
    1. Emoji One
    2. Twemoji
  6. Conclusion

–jeroen

Posted in ASCII, Development, Encoding, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Shift JIS, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »

When someone writes UTF-8 and UTF-16 strings to the same file in binary format without converting between them…

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/21

A while ago, I had to fix some stuff in an application that would write – using a binary mechanism – UTF-8 and UTF-16 strings (part of it XML in various flavours)  to the same byte stream without converting between the two encodings.

Some links that helped me investigate what was wrong, choose what encoding to use for storage and fix it:

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 10 Seattle, Delphi 10.1 Berlin (BigBen), Delphi XE8, Development, Encoding, Software Development, UTF-16, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF8, XML, XML/XSD | 3 Comments »

Some notes on stripping NULL characters and BOMs from files

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/31

A while ago I bumped into applications that write alternating UTF-16 and UTF-8 to files without checking what type of encoding the files were using.

So here are some notes to at least save some of the contents.

TODO: figure out how to strip the BOM.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Encoding, Software Development, UTF-16, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »

Coping with UTF-16 / UCS-2 little endian in Batch files: numbers from WMIC

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/11/22

A while ago, I needed to get the various date, time and week values from WMIC to environment variables with pre-padded zeros. I thought: easy job, just write a batch file.

Tough luck: I couldn’t get the values to expand properly. Which in the end was caused by WMIC emitting UTF-16 and the command-interpreter not expecting double-byte character sets which messed up my original batch file.

What I wanted What I got
wmic_Day=21
wmic_DayOfWeek=04
wmic_Hour=15
wmic_Milliseconds=00
wmic_Minute=02
wmic_Month=05
wmic_Quarter=02
wmic_Second=22
wmic_WeekInMonth=04
wmic_Year=2015
Day=21
wmic_DayOfWeek=4
wmic_Hour=15
wmic_Milliseconds=
wmic_Minute=4
wmic_Month=5
wmic_Quarter=2
wmic_Second=22
wmic_WeekInMonth=4
wmic_Year=2015

WMIC uses this encoding because the Wide versions of Windows API calls use UTF-16 (sometimes called UCS-2 as that is where UTF-16 evolved from).

As Windows uses little-endian encoding by default, the high byte (which is zero) of a UTF-16 code point with ASCII characters comes first. That messes up the command interpreter.

Lucikly rojo was of great help solving this.

His solution is centered around set /A, which:

  • handles integer numbers and calls them “numeric” (hinting floating point, but those are truncated to integer; one of the tricks rojo uses)
  • and (be careful with this as 08 and 09 are not octal numbers) uses these prefixes:
    • 0 for Octal
    • 0x for hexadecimal

Enjoy and shiver with the online help extract:
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Algorithms, Batch-Files, Development, Encoding, Floating point handling, Scripting, Software Development, UCS-2, UTF-16, UTF16 | Leave a Comment »

Some interesting encoding/Unicode/text articles on kunststube and links for test files of various encodings

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/17

After yesterdays post on Testing and static methods don’t go well together, I read around on Source (kunststube [WayBack]) a bit more and found these very nice articles on encoding,Unicode and text:

Related on those, some other nice readings:

–jeroen

Posted in Ansi, ASCII, CP437/OEM 437/PC-8, Development, EBCDIC, Encoding, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Shift JIS, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »