AnsiString to UTF8?

[MoonchildHK]

Does anyone know how I can convert an AnsiString into a UTF8 coded string? The word UTF8 does not even see to be in any of the Help files with Borland C++ Builder 5!!

Any help would be much appreciated!

 

[2ffat]

Forgive my ignorance, but what is UTF8? How do you go from a C++ character array to UTF8?

James P. Cottingham

I am the Unknown lead by the Unknowing.
I have done so much with so little
for so long that they think I am now
qualified to do anything with nothing.

 

[MoonchildHK]

UTF8 (UCS Transformation Format 8 bit) is a way of representing non-latin characters. In the same way that WideStrings can contain chinese, korean and japanese etc characters, so can UTF8.

UTF8 is used by many programs to transfer these non-latin characters accross networks (in my case, I need to communicate with another chat client that uses UTF8 for non-latin characters).

Unfortunatly, I can't find any simple way to convert from AnsiString, or WideString to UTF8 :-(

 

[2ffat]

Do you know how to convert standard character arrays to UTF8? for example:

char Test[12] = "Hi, there";
...
// How would you convert Test to UTF8?

James P. Cottingham

I am the Unknown lead by the Unknowing.
I have done so much with so little
for so long that they think I am now
qualified to do anything with nothing.

 

[cyprus106]

Now I may be way off here, but if you can do the same thing with a WideString, why dont you instead of trying to go through all this hassle? Cyprus

 

[MoonchildHK]

WideString != UTF8 sadly.

I have solved the problem now by writing my own routine to convert from WideString to UTF8 and vice-versa. UTF8 uses the first few bit's of a byte to identify how many bytes are in that character (as a character may be 1 to 5 bytes long) whereas WideString is always 2 bytes per character. AnsiString is a combination of 1 and 2 byte characters, which is why it can fairly easily be converted (and even cast) to a WideString.

 

[Zyrenthian]

Search on "icu" on the internet... possibly add in internationalization. This has methods to handle UTF8 / 16 and it is open source. I belive it was developed by IBM

Matt