Converting Unicode

[sams]

Hi @all,

I'm searching for a solution for the following problem:
I want to replace all unicode characters in a string with a valid
substituition.

For example:

string s = "Catalán";
string s2 = ModifyMyString(s); //s2 = "Catal\xC3\xA1n"

Since replacing unicode characters in a string that way, should be a
very common task, I asked myself whether there is a function in the
..NET-Framework, that does this job. Doing a s.Replace("á","\xC3\xA1")
would not be a very effective way cause there are "many" unicode
characters.

Thanks for help
Sams

 

[Dmytro Lapshyn [MVP]]

Hi,

You can probably use Regular Expressions to replace multiple occurences of
the same character with the substitution sequence.

--
Sincerely,
Dmytro Lapshyn [Visual Developer - Visual C# MVP]

Hi @all,

I'm searching for a solution for the following problem:
I want to replace all unicode characters in a string with a valid
substituition.

For example:

string s = "Catalán";
string s2 = ModifyMyString(s); //s2 = "Catal\xC3\xA1n"

Since replacing unicode characters in a string that way, should be a
very common task, I asked myself whether there is a function in the
..NET-Framework, that does this job. Doing a s.Replace("á","\xC3\xA1")
would not be a very effective way cause there are "many" unicode
characters.

Thanks for help
Sams

 

[Bruce Wood]

What is the nature of your substitution? Are you trying to convert
Unicode to UTF-8? If so, there are methods for doing this within the
Framework.

If the encoding is totally your own then you would need to create a new
subclass of Encoding (if you want to build the Cadillac version).

 

[sams]

Thanks so far for your suggestions.

To answer the question about the nature of the substitution Bruce
asked: I'm reading content from a SQL Server 2000 and want to insert it
into an PostgreSQL DB. I think the database driver I use only accepts
ASCII encodings (characters [0..9][A..z] and those replacement strings
I already mentioned). The database, of course, is unicode compatible.
Since my knowledge of unicode/utf-8 is not sufficient enough, I'm going
to find those functions Bruce mentioned. I will keep you up to date. If
someone has another idea I would be very happy.

Sams

 

[Dmytro Lapshyn [MVP]]

Sams,

The real question is how are you going to pass UTF-8 characters to the
driver. Remember that System.String is *always* Unicode, so unless you have
a way to pass a byte array, you might have hard time passing a UTF-8 string.
Can you please elaborate on the driver interface you are using?

 

[Joerg Jooss]

Hi @all,

I'm searching for a solution for the following problem:
I want to replace all unicode characters in a string with a valid
substituition.

For example:

string s = "Catalán";
string s2 = ModifyMyString(s); //s2 = "Catal\xC3\xA1n"

Since replacing unicode characters in a string that way, should be a
very common task, I asked myself whether there is a function in the
.NET-Framework, that does this job. Doing a s.Replace("á","\xC3\xA1")
would not be a very effective way cause there are "many" unicode
characters.

Characters and thus strings in .NET are alyways Unicode. There's no
difference between replacing characters with characters and replacing
Unicode characters with characters. And "\xC3\xA1" is not a character,
but a string that says
\xC3\xA1

You seem to be confusing these things with character encoding?

Cheers,

 

[Mihai N.]

string s = "Catalán";

string s2 = ModifyMyString(s); //s2 = "Catal\xC3\xA1n"

C3 A1 are the bytes used to represent á as UTF-8.
A .NET string is Unicode (UTF-16 representation), so probably
what you want is to convert a string to a UTF-8 byte array.
If this is the case, take a look at System.Text.UTF8Encoding

But depending on what mechanism you are using to interact with the database,
you may not need to do your own conversion.