Login or Register to Ask a Question and Join Our Community

Sponsored Content
Full Discussion: Convert UTF-8 encoded hex value to a character
Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users Convert UTF-8 encoded hex value to a character Post 302252183 by cbkihong on Tuesday 28th of October 2008 11:56:06 PM
Old 10-29-2008
Ok, in case you feel bewildered by that manpage (you probably will!), let me give you a series of examples to give you a general idea of some of the most important things you need to know.

As I'm Chinese, I'll use Chinese in the examples. All the code are in UTF-8.

Expected environment: a UTF-8 terminal with proper fonts to render Unicode text.

Test 1 - Let's start with this
Code:
my $str = "你好吗？";

print("$str\n");
printf("Length: %d\n", length($str));

你好吗？
Length: 12

This is made up of 4 Chinese characters, 3 bytes each in UTF-8. So, because Perl does not treat it as UTF-8 but rather ASCII, the length returned is 12. The terminal still renders the string properly because the bytes are returned verbatim to the terminal and the terminal tries to decode the bytestream as UTF-8, remember I assumed the terminal is properly configured to UTF-8 (but not Perl in this case)?

Test 2 - Recognize UTF-8 characters embedded in source code
Code:
use utf8;

my $str = "你好吗？";

print("$str\n");
printf("Length: %d\n", length($str));

Wide character in print at test.pl line 6.
你好吗？
Length: 4

Perl now recognizes the string as a 4-character UTF-8 string, but a warning is issued by Perl, because the output stream (stdout) is not configured to accept UTF-8 decoded strings.

Test 3 - Turn on UTF-8 mode on standard streams
Code:
use utf8;
binmode(*STDOUT, ":utf8");

my $str = "你好吗？";

print("$str\n");
printf("Length: %d\n", length($str));

Now the warning disappears. From the perspective of Perl, UTF-8 is now correctly handled.

But what about strings originated elsewhere (as in your case), rather than embedded in source code? We will need another way.

Test 4 - Use manual decoding
Code:
use Encode;
binmode(*STDOUT, ":utf8");

my $str = "你好吗？";
$str = decode('utf8', $str);

print("$str\n");
printf("Length: %d\n", length($str));

Same result as Test 3, but the decoding is manual. The source code is considered ASCII-encoded, and hence the string literal embedded, but the manual decode allows the decoding of the string literal back to a Perl UTF-8 string, so length() correctly reports the length afterwards.

These examples cover may be 80% of what you will need to know to have Perl process Unicode properly in the majority of cases. For the rest, you will need to consult the manpage.
 

10 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. Programming

Howto convert Ascii -> UTF-8 & back C++

While working with russian text under FreeBSD&MySQL I need to convert a string from MySQL to the Unicode format. I've just started my way in C++ under FreeBSD , so please explain me how can I get ascii code of Char variable and also how can i get a character into variable with the specified ascii... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: macron
3 Replies

2. Red Hat

Can't convert 7bit ASCII to UTF-8

Hello, I am trying to convert a 7bit ASCII file to UTF-8. I have used iconv before though it can't recognize it for some reason and says unknown file encoding. When I used ascii2uni package with different package, ./ascii2uni -a K -a I -a J -a X test_file > new_test_file It still... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: rockf1bull
2 Replies

3. Shell Programming and Scripting

How to modify character to UTF-8 in shell script?

I have a shell script running to load some data from a text file to database. Text file contains some non-ASCII characters like ü. How can i convert these characters to UTF-8 codes before loading to DB. (5 Replies)
Discussion started by: vel4ever
5 Replies

4. Shell Programming and Scripting

Convert hex to decimal

can someone help me in converting hex streams to decimal values using perl script Hex value: $my_hex_stream="0c07ac14001676"; Every hex value in the above stream should be converted in to decimal and separated by comma. The output should be: 12,07,172,20,00,22,118 (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: Arun_Linux
2 Replies

5. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Issue with UTF-8 BOM character in text file

Sometimes we recieve some excel files containing French/Japanese characters over the mail, and these files are manually transferred to the server by using SFTP (security is not a huge concern here). The data is changed to text format before transferring it using Notepad. Problem is: When saving... (4 Replies)
Discussion started by: jawsnnn
4 Replies

6. Linux

Help to Convert file from UNIX UTF-8 to Windows UTF-16

Hi, I have tried to convert a UTF-8 file to windows UTF-16 format file as below from unix machine unix2dos < testing.txt | iconv -f UTF-8 -t UTF-16 > out.txt and i am getting some chinese characters as below which l opened the converted file on windows machine. LANG=en_US.UTF-8... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: phanidhar6039
3 Replies

7. Shell Programming and Scripting

Trying to convert utf-8 to WINDOWS-1251

Hello all i have utf-8 file that i try to convert to WINDOWS-1251 on linux without any success the file name is utf-8 when i try to do : file -bi test.txt it gives me : text/plain; charset=utf-8 when i try to convert the file i do : /usr/bin/iconv -f UTF-8 -t WINDOWS-1251 test.txt >... (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: umen
1 Replies

8. UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

UTF-8,16,32 character lengths using awk

Hi All, I am trying to obtain count of characters using awk, but "length" function returns a value of 1 for 2-byte or 3-byte characters as well unlike wc -c command. I have tried to use the below commands within awk function, but it does not seem to work { cmd="wc -c "stringtocheck ( cmd )... (6 Replies)
Discussion started by: tostay2003
6 Replies

9. Shell Programming and Scripting

Convert UTF-8 file to ASCII/ISO8859-1 OR replace characters

I am trying to develop a script which will work on a source UTF-8 file and perform one or more of the following It will accept the target encoding as an argument e.g. US-ASCII or ISO-8859-1, etc 1. It should replace all occurrences of characters outside target character set by " " (space) or... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: hemkiran.s
3 Replies

10. UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Convert files to UTF-8 on AIX 7.1

Dears, I have a shell script - working perfectly on Oracle Linux - that detects the encoding (the charset to be exact) of the files in a specified directory using the "file" command (The file command outputs the charset in Linux, but doesn't do that in AIX), then if the file isn't a UTF-8 text... (4 Replies)
Discussion started by: JeanM-1
4 Replies

LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

netsds::util::convert

NetSDS::Util::Convert(3pm)				User Contributed Perl Documentation				NetSDS::Util::Convert(3pm)

NAME

       NetSDS::Util::Convert - data formats conversion functions

SYNOPSIS

	       use NetSDS::Util::Convert qw(...);

DESCRIPTION

       "NetSDS::Util::Convert" module contains miscelaneous functions.

       o   CLI parameters processing

       o   types validation

       o   HEX, Base64, URI, BCD encondig

       o   UUID processing

EXPORTED FUNCTIONS

       conv_conv_str_bcd($str) - convert string to little-endian BCD
	   This function converts string to little-endian BCD encoding filled with F16 value.

       conv_chr_hex($char) - encode char to hexadecimal string
		   $hex = conv_chr_hex('a'); # return 61

       conv_hex_chr($hex) - convert hexadecimal string to character
		   $chr = conv_hex_chr('4A'); # return 'J'

       conv_str_hex($str) - convert byte string to hexadecimal
		   $str = 'Want hex dump!';
		   $hex = conv_hex_str($str);
		   print "Hex string: " . $hex;

       conv_hex_str($string) - convert hex to byte string
		   $hex = '7A686F7061';
		   $string = conv_hex_str($hex);
		   print "String from hex: " . $string;

       conv_str_base64($str) - convert string to Base64
		   my $b64 = str_base64("Hallo, people!");

       conv_base64_str($b64) - convert Base64 to string
		   my $str = base64_str($base64_string);

       conv_str_uri($str) - convert string to URI encoded
	   Example:

		   my $uri = str_uri("http://www.google.com/?q=what");

       conv_uri_str($uri) - decode URI encoded string
	   Example:

		   my $str = uri_str($uri_string);

EXAMPLES

       None

BUGS

       None

TODO

       1. Add other encodings support

SEE ALSO

       Pod::Usage, Data::UUID

AUTHORS

       Valentyn Solomko <pere@pere.org.ua>

       Michael Bochkaryov <misha@rattler.kiev.ua>

perl v5.12.4							    2011-08-27						NetSDS::Util::Convert(3pm)
All times are GMT -4. The time now is 08:59 AM.
Unix & Linux Forums Content Copyright 1993-2022. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy