Coverting text files with binary file page code functionality

[kolbe]

Hello all,

I needed to use an a 8-bit ascii (as in with diacritics, accents and the like) file with bassic4ppc so I had to figure out how to use the page code options in the binaryfile object. Don't know if this is the best way to do this but it works. There is not much of an explanation in the help files so thought this might be helpful to someone else.

tbin1 is the binfile object

To import a file:

	'convert extended ascii to native utf-8
	FileOpen(c1,"ascii file.txt",cRandom)
	FileOpen(c2,"utf8 file.txt",cWrite)
	
	'use  1252 or 28591 for the ascii page code
	tbin1.New2(c1,1252)
	
	'read bytes
	length=FileSize("ascii file.txt")
	Dim temp_array(length) As byte
	tbin1.ReadBytes(temp_array(),length)

	'convert to string
	string=tbin1.BytesToString(temp_array(),0,length-1)
	
	'write string to a utf8 file
	FileWrite(c2,string)
	
	FileClose(c1)
	FileClose(c2)

To export a file:

	'convert from native utf-8 to extended ascii
	FileOpen(c1,"ascii file.txt",cRandom)
	FileOpen(c2,"utf8 file.txt",cRead)
	
	'set page code to 1252 or 28591
	tbin1.New2(c1,1252)

	'get string from utf8 file
	string=FileReadToEnd(c2)

	'convert string to bytes
	length=StrLength(string)
	Dim temp_array(length) As byte
	temp_array()=tbin1.StringToBytes(string)

	'write bytes to ascii file
	tbin1.WriteBytes(temp_array())
	
	FileClose(c1)
	FileClose(c2)

use page code 1200 if you need to convert to/from utf16

Enjoy!

[agraham]

This post has inspired me to add a CodepageFile object to my BytesConverter library so you can read/write using codepages without having to go through a byte array. See ByteConverter library