SPSS dll i have does not support encoding. It reads French and German OK but any double byte language string, e.g. Chinese, Japanese, or Russian, reads back as "???"
// At binary level, the buffer actually contains "3f" for each "?". This may be the result of a failed unicode conversion.
When we write into .sav file, the interface only allows us to set interface encoding (not file level encoding, or code page). I suspect maybe the dll does not support double byte languages.
I have created SPSSDocument for write data but cannot find any encoding while creating file.
Can anyone help me in this issue?
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We have an old MFC c++ application that writes into a SQLite database and another C# application that reads from the database.
The C++ application writes "шаг потока работы" (Cyrillic characters) in the database from a Russian Windows computer.
When the same C++ application reads it on a Western European (Latin) Windows computer, it reads it as "øàã ïîòîêà ðàáîòû" (Latin representation).
When the C# application reads it, it reads it as "��� ������ ����" (Unicode representation).
None of these applications specify encoding type in the database. I want to read the original text in C#.
I couldn't find a proper way to specify the Encoding type when reading the text.
I've tried connection strings such as Data Source=c:\mydb.db;Version=3;UTF8Encoding=True; but no luck so far.
Also I tried to get the byte array from "��� ������ ����" and convert to Cyrillic but failed.
Does anyone happen know how to read the original Russian text back from a SQLite database?
All the normal functions in the SQLite C API use UTF-8. The C# SQLite driver automatically converts between UTF-8 and the C# string encoding.
If you do not get correct data from your C# program, then it's likely that the C++ application did not actually UTF-8. This is confirmed by the fact that the C++ application gives different results with different code pages.
If possible, fix the C++ application, or convert the data in the database from the original encoding to UTF-8. As a last resort, you could change your C# application to read all the strings as blobs and then convert them from the original encoding to UTF-8. (In any case, you need to know what the original encoding is.)
I have several folders with files, some folders contain non-latin symbols in their names (russian in my case). This folders are sending to zip archive (by windows explorer) in "D:\test.zip".
Then I execute method
ZipFile.ExtractToDirectory(#"D:\test.zip", #"D:\result");
and it successfully unzip all content, but all non-latin symbols turn into something wrong.
For example, instead of "D:\result\каскады\file.txt" I got "D:\result\Є бЄ ¤л\file.txt".
Default encoding of my system is windows-1251 which I verified by involving Encoding.GetEncoding("windows-1251") into third parameter of ExtractToDirectory and getting the same result. I also tried UTF-8, but got another artifacts inside path ("D:\result\��᪠��\file.txt"). Trying Unicode return me message about not supported encoding.
When I create same archive through the code by executing method
ZipFile.CreateFromDirectory(#"D:\zipdata", #"D:\test.zip");
everything then unzipping fine with the same line of code as in the top of the question, even without specifying particular encodings.
The question is: how to get correct encoding from archive for applying it in ExtractToDirectory method, in respect that in real task archive comes from external source and I can not rely on wherether it created 'by hands' or programmatically?
Edit
There is question where also non-latin symbols (chinese) cause problems, but this fact was given like resolution of question, whereas this is exactly problem for my situation.
There is no formally standardized ZIP specification. However, the de facto standard is the PKZIP "application note" document, which as of 2006 documents only code page 437 ("OEM United States") and UTF8 as legal text encodings for file entries in the archive:
D.1 The ZIP format has historically supported only the original IBM PC character
encoding set, commonly referred to as IBM Code Page 437. This limits storing
file name characters to only those within the original MS-DOS range of values
and does not properly support file names in other character encodings, or
languages. To address this limitation, this specification will support the
following change.
D.2 If general purpose bit 11 is unset, the file name and comment should conform
to the original ZIP character encoding. If general purpose bit 11 is set, the
filename and comment must support The Unicode Standard, Version 4.1.0 or
greater using the character encoding form defined by the UTF-8 storage
specification. The Unicode Standard is published by the The Unicode
Consortium (www.unicode.org). UTF-8 encoded data stored within ZIP files
is expected to not include a byte order mark (BOM).
In other words, it's a bug in any ZIP authoring tool to use any text encoding other than code page 437 or UTF8. Based on your experience, it appears Windows Explorer has this bug. :(
Unfortunately, the "general purpose bit 11" is the only official mechanism for indicating the actual text encoding used in the archive, and this allows only for either the original 437 code page or UTF8. Even this bit was not supported by .NET until .NET 4.5. In any case, even since that time it is not possible for .NET or any other ZIP archive-aware software to reliably determine a non-standard, unsupported encoding used to encode the file entry names in the archive.
However, you can, if the source machine used to create the archive is known and available, determine the default code page installed on that machine, via the CultureInfo class. The following expression will return the code page identifier installed on the machine where the expression is executed (assuming the process hasn't changed its current culture from the default, of course):
System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.OEMCodePage
This gives you the code page ID that can be passed to Encoding.GetEncoding(Int32) to retrieve an Encoding object that can then be passed to the appropriate ZipArchive constructor when opening an existing archive, to ensure that the file entry names are decoded correctly.
If you are unable to retrieve the actual text encoding from the machine that is the origin of the archive, then you're stuck enumerating the encodings, trying each one until you find one that reports entry names in a legible format.
As I understand it, Windows 8 and later can support the UTF8 flag in the ZIP archive file. I haven't tried it, but it's possible that such versions of Windows also write archives using that flag. If so, that would (one hopes) mitigate the pain of the earlier Windows bug.
Finally note that a custom tool could record the encoding in a special file entry placed in the archive itself. Of course, only that tool would be able to recognize the special file and use it to determine the correct encoding (the tool would have to open the archive twice: once to retrieve the file, and then a second time once the tool has determined the encoding). This is not an ideal solution and of course is no help for archives created by Windows Explorer. I mention it only for the sake of completeness.
I am using C#, I have a comma delimited csv file with different strings in different languages.
My app should only open the CSV if it's unicode.
Is there an easy way to determine this in code ?
When you say "Unicode" I assume you mean UTF-8. Unicode is not an encoding and a file can't be "Unicode".
You could use a library, for example, ude is a C# library that attempts to determine what encoding a file uses. It uses the algorithm described here. It is not 100% foolproof.
The CSV specification does not provide a way to provide metadata describing the encoding format. The specification itself uses ASCII encoding for separators. But the data tokens between separators can be anything.
You will have to read through the data itself and infer the coding type based on that.
If you are in control of the output and input, you could modify the format it for your own needs by adding your own metadata, but then it wouldn't fit the CSV file format then, if that matters in your case.
So no, there isn't an "easy" way to determine the encoding.
I have a C++ program that sends data via FTP via ASCII mode to an IBM Mainframe. I am now doing this via C#.
When it gets there and viewed the file looks like garbage.
I cannot see anything in the C++ code that does anything special to encode the file into something like EPCDIC. When the C++ files are sent they are viewed ok. The only thing I see different is \015 & \012 for line feeds whereas C# is using \r\n.
Would these characters have an effect and if so how can I get my C# app to use \015?
Do I have to do any special encoding to make it appear ok?
It sounds like you should indeed be using an EBCDIC encoding, and then probably transferring the text in binary. I have an EBCDIC encoding class you can use, should you wish.
Note that \015\012 is \r\n - they're characters 13 and 10 in decimal, just different ways of representing them. If you think the C++ code really is producing the same files as C#, compare two files which should be the same in a binary file editor.
Make sure you have the TYPE TEXT instead of TYPE BINARY command before you transfer the file.
If you are truly sending the files in ASCII mode, then the mainframe itself will convert that to EBCDIC (it's receiver-makes-good).
The fact that you're getting apparent garbage at the mainframe end, and character codes \015 and \012 (which are CR and LF respectively) means that you're not transferring in ASCII mode.
As an aside, the ISPF editor has been able to view ASCII data sets for quite a few versions now. Open up the file and enter the commands source ascii and lf.
The first renders converts the characters from ASCII to EBCDIC so you can see what they are, the second goes through and pads out "lines" so that linefeed markers are replaced with enough spaces to reach the record length.
Invaluable commands when dealing with mixed-encoding environments, which is where I do a lot of my work.
I have a header file in C++/CLI project, which contains some strings in different languages.
arabic, english, german, chinese, french, japanese etc...
I have a second project written in C#.
Here I access the strings stored in the header file of the C++/CLI project.
The encoding of the header file is Unicode - Codepage 1200 or UTF-8.
the visual studio editor is able to display the strings correctly.
At runtime I access these strings and assign them into a local String variable.
Here I recognized that many strings are not shown correctly. Doesn't matter if I assign them or not. Accessing the original place (while debugging) shows me all the foreign strings with question marks. Especially chinese, just question marks.
Example : "So?e St?ange ?ext in Ch?n?se"
(This is not the best example, I know)
What is the problem?
I read that C# is by default UTF-16,
My header file containing the strings is UTF-16 or UTF-8.
I must be able to handle strings in different languages. What am I doing wrong?
The '?" means that the text is read as Unicode(UTF16) and somehwere there is a conversion to your current code page. Since your current codepage is NOT chinese the chinese chararcters will get transformed to '?'
It would be helpful to see the code.