Converting textfile from Mac to Windows

[Jone]

Hello,

I have tried to convert a Mac text file to Windows using code below.

Encoding Win = Encoding.GetEnc oding("Windows-1252");

Encoding Mac = Encoding.GetEnc oding("macintos h");

byte[] macBytes = Mac.GetBytes(Ro w);

byte[] WinBytes = Encoding.Conver t(Mac, Win, macBytes);

char[] WinChars = new char[Win.GetCharCoun t(WinBytes, 0, WinBytes.Length )];

Win.GetChars(Wi nBytes, 0, WinBytes.Length , WinChars, 0);

string WinString = new string(WinChars );

return WinString;

But, it does not convert e.g. German and Scandinavian characters written in
Mac to proper format in Windows.
How can a textfile written in MAc could be converted into Windows
environment?

Cheers!

[Peter Duniho]

Re: Converting textfile from Mac to Windows

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:21:30 -0700, Jone <jone@mail.comw rote:

[...]
But, it does not convert e.g. German and Scandinavian characters written
in
Mac to proper format in Windows.
How can a textfile written in MAc could be converted into Windows
environment?

It all depends on what encoding the text _really_ is in.

The encodings you've selected are in fact Mac and Windows encodings. But
just because a file came from the Mac doesn't mean it's using "code page
10000", and likewise just because you're running Windows, that doesn't
mean you want the text encoded in "code page 1252".

So you need to find out where the file came from and what encoding was
actually used. You also need to look at what program you intend to use to
look at the text in Windows and find out what encoding(s) it
expects/supports. Then you need to use the correct source and destination
encodings, based on that information.

Ideally you'll find that on the Mac, you can output your text as a Unicode
format (e.g. UTF-8) and on Windows you can import your text as the same
Unicode format. Then you have no conversion to do at all (well, except
for adding the extra CR to the LF that the Mac text files usually use
alone for line breaks :) ).

Pete

[Joachim Van den Bogaert]

Re: Converting textfile from Mac to Windows

I have experienced the problem of converting windows to mac.
We needed Word files for Mac 8.5 so what I did was the following:
First convert the text to rtf, then parse the rtf with a matrix I
composed from the official codepages you find here

http://unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/

I used this approach because there was something wrong with the
conversion in Word for Windows.
CE languages showed corrupted characters.

After I wrote the conversion tool, the files were ok for mac.

The text is plain ASCII so I suggest you have a look at the codepages
on the link I gave you
and do a hex dump of your file (rename it to a .bin file for example)
in Visual Studio so you can trace wrong characters.
Maybe then you can find out which code page has been used. If the
approach with the .NET codepages doesnt work
you can still use the matrix method,

Hope this helps,
Joachim

[Jone]

Re: Converting textfile from Mac to Windows


"Joachim Van den Bogaert" <joachim@yamaga ta-europe.comwrote in message
news:c8cd4d70-58bb-4671-a3ba-834c907352eb@f3 6g2000hsa.googl egroups.com...

>I have experienced the problem of converting windows to mac.
We needed Word files for Mac 8.5 so what I did was the following:
First convert the text to rtf, then parse the rtf with a matrix I
composed from the official codepages you find here
>

http://unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/

>
I used this approach because there was something wrong with the
conversion in Word for Windows.
CE languages showed corrupted characters.
>
After I wrote the conversion tool, the files were ok for mac.
>
The text is plain ASCII so I suggest you have a look at the codepages
on the link I gave you
and do a hex dump of your file (rename it to a .bin file for example)
in Visual Studio so you can trace wrong characters.
Maybe then you can find out which code page has been used. If the
approach with the .NET codepages doesnt work
you can still use the matrix method,
>
Hope this helps,
Joachim

Thank Joachim for your reply.
My case is following:

1. Filemaker should write a file to filesystem containig data from database.
2. C# / Asp.Net should read this file, parse it and insert data into SQL
Server.

Problem is that special characters that Filemaker writes into file are not
shown correctly in
Windows.

I have tried to encoding using C#'s Encoding classes but still special
characters are not shown.

Do you know that what is the default encoding when FileMaker writes data
into file?
Is it possible and how to change encoding so that Windows can also
understand it, maybe UTF8?

I would be very grateful for tips what comes to proper encoding between Mac
FileMaker and Windows.

Thanks,

- J