According to MSDN vb.net uses this extended character set. In my experience it actually uses this:
What am I missing? Why does it say it uses the one and uses the other?
Am I doing something wrong?
Is there some sort of conversion tool to the original character set?
This behaviour is defined in the documentation of the Chr command:
The returned value depends on the code page for the current thread, which is contained in the ANSICodePage property of the TextInfo class in the System.Globalization namespace. You can obtain ANSICodePage by specifying System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ANSICodePage.
So, the output of Chr for values greater than 127 is system-dependent. If you want reproducible results, create the desired instance of Encoding by calling Encoding.GetEncoding(String), then use Encoding.GetChars(Byte()) to convert your numeric values into characters.
If you go up one level in the chart linked in your question, you will see that they do not claim that this chart is always the output of the Chr command:
The characters that appear in Windows above 127 depend on the selected typeface.
The charts in this section show the default character set for a console application.
Your application is a WinForm application, not a console application. Even in the console, the character set used can be changed (for example, by using the chcp command), hence the word "default".
For detailed information about the encodings used in .net, I recommend the following MSDN article: Character Encoding in the .NET Framework.
The first character set is Code Page 437 (CP437), the second looks like Code Page 1252 (CP1252) also known as Windows Latin-1.
I'd guess VB.Net is simply picking up the default encoding for the PC.
How did you write all this? Because usually, when you use a output stream function, you can specify the encoding going with it.
Edit: I know this is not C#, but you can see the idea...
You'd have to set the encoding of your filestream, by doing something like this:
Setting the encoding when creating the filestream
Related
I would like to determine the Thousand Separator used while running a VBA Code on a target machine without resolving to calling system built-in functions such as (Separator = Application.ThousandsSeparator).
I am using the following simple code using 'Format':
ThousandSeparator = Mid(Format(1000, "#,#"), 2, 1)
The above seems to work fine, and would like to confirm if this is a safe method of doing it without resorting to system calls.
I would expect the result to be a single char string in the form of , or . or ' or a Space as applicable to the locale on the machine.
Please note that I want to only use a language statement such as Format or similar (no sys calls). Also this relates to Thousands Separator not Decimal Separator. This article Using VBA to detect which decimal sign the computer is using does not help or answer my question. Thanks
Thanks in advance.
The strict answer to whether it is safe to use Format to get the thousands separator is No.
E.g. on Windows, it is possible to enter up to three characters into the Thousands Separator field in the regional settings in the control panel.
Suppose you enter asd and click OK.
If you now call Format(1000, "#,#") it will give you 1a000. That is only the first letter of your thousands separator. You have failed to retrieve it correctly.
Reading the registry:
? CreateObject("WScript.Shell").RegRead("HKCU\Control Panel\International\sThousand")
you get back asd in full.
To be fair, the Excel international properties do not seem to be of much help either. Application.International(xlThousandsSeparator) in this situation will return the separator originally defined in your computer's locale, not the value you've overridden it to.
Having that said, the practical answer is Yes, because it would appear (and if you happen to know for sure, please post an answer here) that there is no culture with multi-char thousand separator (even in China where scary things like 1億2345万6789 or 1億2345萬6789 exist, they happen to be represented with just one UTF-16 character), and you probably are happy to ignore the people who decided to play with their locale settings in that fashion.
In the same application I have two different instances of wxStaticText. Each displays an angular value expressed in degrees. I've tested both instances for font name and font encoding. They are the same for both. I've tested that both strings passed to SetLabel() are using the same character value, decimal 176. Yet one displays the 'degree' character (small circle, up high) as expected and the other instead displays an odd character I'm not familiar with. How can this be? Is there some other property of wxStaticText I need to test?
I can't explain what you're seeing because obviously two identical controls must behave in the same way, but I can tell you that using decimal 176 is not a good way to encode the degree sign, unless you explicitly use wxConvISO8859_1 to create the corresponding wxString.
It is better to use wxString::FromUTF8("\xc2\xb0") instead or, preferably, make sure that your source files are UTF-8 encoded and just use wxString::FromUTF8("°").
Arghhhh! Found it. I was assuming SetLabel() was wxStaticText::SetLabel(), inherited from the wxWindow base class. It's not. We have a wrapper class of our own around wxStaticText that I was not aware of. It's the wrapper class that is bollixing the string value.
Moral: When debugging unfamiliar code, don't make assumptions, step ALL THE WAY in.
I am working on an application to search for and build a list of all the times a string (or variable of) is in a text file. Kind of like a Find All function in a text editor that I can build a list with the info that is found, such as
S350
S250
S270
S5000
What can I use to do this search? It will have one value that does not change (The S in this case) followed by up to 4 digits
RegEx seems like a good choice.
Something like.. S(\d{1,4})? might work for you.
Expresso is my preferred regular expression composer.
I'm converting a WinForms app to Silverlight (VB.NET). What should I use instead of Char.ConvertFromUtf32 as it's not available to use in Silverlight?
UTF-32 is currently not part of Silverlight, so you have to find a way around the limitation. I think you should stop a moment and think exactly why you need to read UTF32-encoded text.
If you are reading such text from a database or a file on the server, I would perform the conversion server-side (if possible I would convert everything to UTF-8 and get rid of the UTF-32 data in one shot).
If you are parsing a user-provided file on the client side, I would detect the UTF-32 encoding and gently tell the user that the file encoding is not supported. UTF32 is pretty rare nowadays, so I guess it should not be a very common case (but I could be wrong not knowing your exact situation).
In order to detect the file encoding you have to look at the first few bytes (byte order mark) -more information here, if they are not present the task becomes much harder and involves some kind of heuristics based on character frequency.
From: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/types/how-to-convert-between-hexadecimal-strings-and-numeric-types
You can use a direct cast, like:
// Get the character corresponding to the integral value.
string stringValue = Char.ConvertFromUtf32(value);
char charValue = (char)value;
Small warning, it will only work up to 0xffff. It will not work for high range Unicode from 0x10000 to 0x10ffff.
Also, if you need to parse \uXXXX, try this other question: How do I convert Unicode escape sequences to Unicode characters in a .NET string?
I set the culture to Hungarian language, and Chr() seems to be broken.
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = "hu-US"
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = "hu-US"
Chr(254)
This returns "ţ" when it should be "þ"
However, Asc("ţ") returns 116.
This: Asc(Chr(254)) returns 116.
Why would Asc() and Chr() be different?
I checked and the 'wide' functions do work correctly: ascw(chrw(254)) = 254
Chr(254) interprets the argument in a system dependent way, by looking at the System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ANSICodePage property. See the MSDN article about Chr. You can check whether that value is what you expect. "hu-US" (the hungarian locale as used in the US) might do something strange there.
As a side-note, Asc() has no promise about the used codepage in its current documentation (it was there until 3.0).
Generally I would stick to the unicode variants (ending on -W) if at all possible or use the Encoding class to explicitly specify the conversions.
My best guess is that your Windows tries to represent Chr(254)="ţ" as a combined letter, where the first letter is Chr(116)="t" and the second ("¸" or something like that) cannot be returned because Chr() only returns one letter.
Unicode text should not be handled character-by-character.
It sounds like you need to set the code page for the current thread -- the current culture shouldn't have any effect on Asc and Chr.
Both the Chr docs and the Asc docs have this line:
The returned character depends on the code page for the current thread, which is contained in the ANSICodePage property of the TextInfo class. TextInfo.ANSICodePage can be obtained by specifying System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ANSICodePage.
I have seen several problems in VBA on the Mac where characters over 127 and some control characters are not treated properly.
This includes paragraph marks (especially in text copied from the internet or scanned), "¥", and "Ω".
They cannot always be searched for, cannot be used in file names - though they could in the past, and when tested, come up as another ascii number. I have had to write algorithms to change these when files open, as they often look like they are the right character, but then crash some of my macros when they act strangely. The character will look and act right when I save the file, but may be changed when it is reopened.
I will eventually try to switch to unicode, but I am not sure if that will help this issue.
This may not be the issue that you are observing, but I would not rule out isolated problems with certain characters like this. I have sent notes to MS about this in the past but have received no joy.
If you cannot find another solution and the character looks correct when you type it in, then I recommend using a macro snippet like the one below, which I run when updating tables. You of course have to setup theRange as the area you are looking at. A whole file can take a while.
For aChar = 1 To theRange.Characters.count
theRange.Characters(aChar).Select
If Asc(Selection.Text) = 95 And Selection.Text <> "_" Then Selection.TypeText "Ω"
Next aChar