utf-8 to ascii

[mail2atulmehta]

I have a question. how to generate two files, one in UTF-8, the other
in ASCII with the same column length SO that when i do the conversion
from utf-8 to ascii, the column length does not change . any help is
appreciated thanks

 

[Richard Bos]

I have a question. how to generate two files, one in UTF-8, the other
in ASCII with the same column length SO that when i do the conversion
from utf-8 to ascii, the column length does not change .

Depends. What is "column length" in UTF? Is it the number of UTF-encoded
characters, the number of characters in that encoding, or something else
again? Note that for non-ASCII characters, the first count is smaller
than the second. Also, what are you going to do with those characters?
How will you map U0641 to ASCII?

(Note that a strict interpretation of what you wrote would result in a
trivial implementation: if a UTF-encoded character is not ASCII, it
cannot be converted to ASCII, so the whole conversion fails because of
malformed input - but if all input _is_ ASCII, then it has the same
encoding in UTF-8 as in ASCII in the first place, and no conversion is
necessary. This is not likely to be an acceptable solution ;-) )

Richard

 

[SM Ryan]

# I have a question. how to generate two files, one in UTF-8, the other
# in ASCII with the same column length SO that when i do the conversion
# from utf-8 to ascii, the column length does not change . any help is
# appreciated thanks

If you're restricting yourself to the ASCII codes x01 through x7E, the
UTF-8 and ASCII are identical. x00 is sometimes remapped to an unused unicode
character and I don't remember if x7F is the same in both.

 

[Clark S. Cox III]

# I have a question. how to generate two files, one in UTF-8, the other
# in ASCII with the same column length SO that when i do the conversion
# from utf-8 to ascii, the column length does not change . any help is
# appreciated thanks

If you're restricting yourself to the ASCII codes x01 through x7E, the
UTF-8 and ASCII are identical. x00 is sometimes remapped to an unused unicode
character and I don't remember if x7F is the same in both.

<pedantic>
By defintion, UTF-8 and ASCII are identical in the range [0, 0x7F],
period. No exception for 0x00 or 0x7F.
</pedantic>

 

[Villy Kruse]

I have a question. how to generate two files, one in UTF-8, the other
in ASCII with the same column length SO that when i do the conversion
from utf-8 to ascii, the column length does not change . any help is
appreciated thanks

To closest ANSI comes to this issue is the mbtowc() and related functions.
However, a multibyte character may be utf-8 but it could also be something else.
And a wide character could be unicode or it may not be. In the interval
0x00 through 0xff the unicode value of a character is identical to the
iso-8859-1 value.

The bottom line is that the OS or some third party library may provide
the required conversion functions.

Villy

 

[mail2atulmehta]

the column length in utf-8 means the number of UTF-encoded
characters.