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digitalmars.D.learn - ASCII to UTF8 Conversion - is this right?

reply Pragma <ericanderton yahoo.removeme.com> writes:
Here's something that came up recently.  As some of you may already 
know, I've been doing some work with forum data recently.

I wanted to move some old forum data, which was stored in ASCII over to 
UTF8 via D.  The problem is that some of the data has characters in the 
0x80-0xff range, which causes UTF-BOM detection to fail.

So I rolled the following function to 'transcode' these characters:

char[] ASCII2UTF8(char[] value){
	char[] result;
	for(uint i=0; i<value.length; i++){
		char ch = value[i];
		if(ch < 0x80){
			result ~= ch;
		}
		else{
			result ~= 0xC0  | (ch >> 6);
			result ~= 0x80  | (ch & 0x3F);
			
			debug writefln("converted: %0.2X to %0.2X %0.2X",ch, result[$-2], 
result[$-1]);
		}
	}
	return result;
}

So my question is, while this conversion is done against a literal 
interpretation of the UTF-8 spec: is this the correct way to treat these 
characters?

Should I be taking user locale into account?  Are high-ASCII chars 
considered to be universal?

-- 
- EricAnderton at yahoo
Dec 18 2006
parent reply Oskar Linde <oskar.lindeREM OVEgmail.com> writes:
Pragma wrote:
 Here's something that came up recently.  As some of you may already 
 know, I've been doing some work with forum data recently.
 
 I wanted to move some old forum data, which was stored in ASCII over to 
 UTF8 via D.  The problem is that some of the data has characters in the 
 0x80-0xff range, which causes UTF-BOM detection to fail.
 
 So I rolled the following function to 'transcode' these characters:
 
 char[] ASCII2UTF8(char[] value){
     char[] result;
     for(uint i=0; i<value.length; i++){
         char ch = value[i];
         if(ch < 0x80){
             result ~= ch;
         }
         else{
             result ~= 0xC0  | (ch >> 6);
             result ~= 0x80  | (ch & 0x3F);
            
             debug writefln("converted: %0.2X to %0.2X %0.2X",ch, 
 result[$-2], result[$-1]);
         }
     }
     return result;
 }
 
 So my question is, while this conversion is done against a literal 
 interpretation of the UTF-8 spec: is this the correct way to treat these 
 characters?
First, ASCII is a 7 bit encoding that only defines characters <= 0x7f. The encoding of the upper 128 bytes are locale dependent and can not be called "ASCII". There are numerous different encodings used for the upper 128 code points. The above is correct if the source text is in Latin1 (ISO-8859-1) coding. This is probably the most common single byte encoding for Western Europe and the US. The windows english standard charset 1252 is a superset of latin1 and defines the range 0x80-0x9f differently.
 Should I be taking user locale into account?  Are high-ASCII chars 
 considered to be universal?
Rename the function Latin12UTF8 and you have something that behaves correctly according to spec. :) Best regards, /Oskar
Dec 18 2006
next sibling parent reply =?windows-1252?Q?Jari-Matti_M=E4kel=E4?= <jmjmak utu.fi.invalid> writes:
Oskar Linde wrote:
 The above is correct if the source text is in Latin1 (ISO-8859-1)
 coding. This is probably the most common single byte encoding for
 Western Europe and the US. The windows english standard charset 1252 is
 a superset of latin1 and defines the range 0x80-0x9f differently.
Some European sites/users also use ISO-8859-15. I think it might have the euro (€) sign and some minor other differences too.
Dec 18 2006
parent Pragma <ericanderton yahoo.removeme.com> writes:
Jari-Matti Mäkelä wrote:
 Oskar Linde wrote:
 The above is correct if the source text is in Latin1 (ISO-8859-1)
 coding. This is probably the most common single byte encoding for
 Western Europe and the US. The windows english standard charset 1252 is
 a superset of latin1 and defines the range 0x80-0x9f differently.
Some European sites/users also use ISO-8859-15. I think it might have the euro (€) sign and some minor other differences too.
Ah. Good to know. I'll take that into consideration as well. Thanks! -- - EricAnderton at yahoo
Dec 18 2006
prev sibling parent reply Pragma <ericanderton yahoo.removeme.com> writes:
Oskar Linde wrote:
 Pragma wrote:
 Here's something that came up recently.  As some of you may already 
 know, I've been doing some work with forum data recently.

 I wanted to move some old forum data, which was stored in ASCII over 
 to UTF8 via D.  The problem is that some of the data has characters in 
 the 0x80-0xff range, which causes UTF-BOM detection to fail.

 So I rolled the following function to 'transcode' these characters:

 char[] ASCII2UTF8(char[] value){
     char[] result;
     for(uint i=0; i<value.length; i++){
         char ch = value[i];
         if(ch < 0x80){
             result ~= ch;
         }
         else{
             result ~= 0xC0  | (ch >> 6);
             result ~= 0x80  | (ch & 0x3F);
                        debug writefln("converted: %0.2X to %0.2X 
 %0.2X",ch, result[$-2], result[$-1]);
         }
     }
     return result;
 }

 So my question is, while this conversion is done against a literal 
 interpretation of the UTF-8 spec: is this the correct way to treat 
 these characters?
First, ASCII is a 7 bit encoding that only defines characters <= 0x7f. The encoding of the upper 128 bytes are locale dependent and can not be called "ASCII". There are numerous different encodings used for the upper 128 code points.
Precisely the reason why I posted this. :) The 'ASCII2UTF8' name was taken for lack of a better title. Admittedly, it's a misnomer. Same goes for my use of "high-ASCII".
 
 The above is correct if the source text is in Latin1 (ISO-8859-1) 
 coding. This is probably the most common single byte encoding for 
 Western Europe and the US. The windows english standard charset 1252 is 
 a superset of latin1 and defines the range 0x80-0x9f differently.
 
 Should I be taking user locale into account?  Are high-ASCII chars 
 considered to be universal?
Rename the function Latin12UTF8 and you have something that behaves correctly according to spec. :)
Makes sense to me. If I can't find a way to determine what codepage users are using in the forum for non-Latin1 posts, I'll just try Latin-1 and see what happens. Thanks! -- - EricAnderton at yahoo
Dec 18 2006
parent Georg Wrede <georg nospam.org> writes:
Pragma wrote:
 Oskar Linde wrote:
 
 Pragma wrote:

 Here's something that came up recently.  As some of you may already 
 know, I've been doing some work with forum data recently.

 I wanted to move some old forum data, which was stored in ASCII over 
 to UTF8 via D.  The problem is that some of the data has characters 
 in the 0x80-0xff range, which causes UTF-BOM detection to fail.

 So I rolled the following function to 'transcode' these characters:

 char[] ASCII2UTF8(char[] value){
     char[] result;
     for(uint i=0; i<value.length; i++){
         char ch = value[i];
         if(ch < 0x80){
             result ~= ch;
         }
         else{
             result ~= 0xC0  | (ch >> 6);
             result ~= 0x80  | (ch & 0x3F);
                        debug writefln("converted: %0.2X to %0.2X 
 %0.2X",ch, result[$-2], result[$-1]);
         }
     }
     return result;
 }

 So my question is, while this conversion is done against a literal 
 interpretation of the UTF-8 spec: is this the correct way to treat 
 these characters?
First, ASCII is a 7 bit encoding that only defines characters <= 0x7f. The encoding of the upper 128 bytes are locale dependent and can not be called "ASCII". There are numerous different encodings used for the upper 128 code points.
Precisely the reason why I posted this. :) The 'ASCII2UTF8' name was taken for lack of a better title. Admittedly, it's a misnomer. Same goes for my use of "high-ASCII".
 The above is correct if the source text is in Latin1 (ISO-8859-1) 
 coding. This is probably the most common single byte encoding for 
 Western Europe and the US. The windows english standard charset 1252 
 is a superset of latin1 and defines the range 0x80-0x9f differently.

 Should I be taking user locale into account?  Are high-ASCII chars 
 considered to be universal?
Rename the function Latin12UTF8 and you have something that behaves correctly according to spec. :)
Makes sense to me. If I can't find a way to determine what codepage users are using in the forum for non-Latin1 posts, I'll just try Latin-1 and see what happens.
You might also want to look at the message headers: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Especially the Content-Type header often tells you directly what the coding is.
Dec 19 2006