Unicode Support

[LBIT]

Hi Everyone,

We've got a bit of an issue happening with our XPe image.

It doesn't seem to support non-ANSI/ASCI characters - e.g. if we try to
download XML that is encoded in UTF-7 or UTF-8, the XML is blank. If we
remove any non standard characters, the XML renders fine.

Does anyone know what components need to be added to ensure the image
supports non-standard characters?

Thanks,
Ben

 

[Wiley Post]

I don't have an answer but I'd like to understand the question in case I'm
missing something I should know. In what sense does the OP believe an OS
should support a particular encoding of XML? Isn't this strictly an
application issue? Is there a particular application that is not behaving
as expected?

WP

 

[LBIT]

Hi Wiley,

I appreciate you taking the time to look at this for me.

Ok, the situation is this. The image has a vb6 compiled exe that uses XML
objects to retrieve XML from a URL.

If the URL contains any sort of encoding other than plain old ASCI text, the
XPe machine is unable to read it. The XML is blank.

At first I thought there must have been something wrong with the code, but
then I confirmed this was the XPe by opening up the URL inside Internet
Explorer. The result is blank XML inside the browser, if I open the same URL
on a normal XPe machine, the XML displays fine.

The XML used to be encoded in UTF 7 or UTF 8 (in the xml header), we then
took that out and everything worked fine, until the XML contained
non-standard characters.

When that happens, the XPe machines can't parse the XML, it comes out blank.

Regards,
Ben

 

[Wiley Post]

This is not an area that I specifically know a lot about but since there
aren't other responses I think I can provide some kind of answer on general
principles. Processing a dialect of XML is not an OS function, it's an
application function. The fact that the processing works correctly on XP
Desktop but not XP Embedded does not indicate an OS issue. It could be a
result of IE8 being available on the desktop but not XPe or it might be the
result of some version of a DLL getting installed on the desktop that is
more capable than the one installed in XPe. If you google VB6 and Unicode
you'll see that Unicode is not directly supported in VB6 and the VB6 app is
what you are concerned about. Saying that when the "URL contains any sort
of encoding other than plain old ASCII text the XPe machine is unable to
read it. The XML is blank" is not what you mean. What you mean is the VB6
application is unable to interpret it.

Here's what I would do but I can't say that it's the best strategy. I would
use "dumpbin /imports" on the VB exe to determine which DLLs it depends on.
I would then compare the XPe and Desktop versions of those DLLs through
Properties/Version Info information. I would suspect that any DLL in XPe
that is a lower version number than the corresponding one on the Desktop
could be the problem. I would then determine if the problematic DLL(s) were
available as redistributables that I could componentize or if they might be
available in an XPe hotfix.

Another approach would be to take your question to a different newsgroup
that deals with issues surrounding XML and Unicode processing in Windows
applications.

Wiley

 

[Richard]

How does the .exe behave on a XP Pro machine? If it works well on the XP
pro machine and not on the embedded machine, then it's probably a case of
certain Code Pages not installed on XPe.