Unicode characters problem

voljanko

Hello.
If I put the code

UI.messagebox "weiß"

in the Ruby console inside Sketchup,is working ok.
But the same code inside the plugin is giving me an error.
I have try it in notepad++ and NetBeans with the some result.

Why is that,what to do about?

thomthom

Because SketchUp is using UTF-8 encoding - and plugins needs to be written in ANSI. ß is a multi-byte character. If you really need it hard coded in your plugin script then either store it as the raw byte characters.
Or - you can store the strings in a UTF-8 text file and load it - that will work. I use UTF-8 encoded files for my translations for Vertex Tools. The strings are loaded into a hash file where the keys are ANSI characters.

thomthom

More reading on Unicode: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=20657

voljanko

Thank you for the very useful reading.
Seems that is a lot of work to implement multilingual support.

thomthom

You mean for the UI?

voljanko

Yes, I'm implementing my own translation system.Strings are in files,like you suggested.

voljanko

Hello.
Another unicode related problem.I can repeat this one only reading from a file,so the file with 1 character is attached.
I can read a character,but is causing some problems if I want to unpack it or concatenate it with other strings.
Here is the sample,where I want to unpack it:

	langfile= Sketchup.find_support_file("fr1.lang" , "Plugins/")

	IO.foreach(langfile) do |line|
		UI.messagebox line.unpack('U*')
	end

The error is :"Error Loading File new.rb
malformed UTF-8 character (expected 3 bytes, given 2 bytes)"

Why is this,how to deal with it?

fr1.lang

Dan Rathbun

1) Try packing the array with "U3" (and unpacking the String with "U3" also.)

2) IO.foreach sets the separator string to $/ by default. ( $/ is set to a newline character by Ruby, and probably should not be changed.)

Make sure you write a newline char to the file after the unicode char(s), for each line.
ADD: puts() will add a newline char for you, so:
` plugdir = File.expand_path(Sketchup.find_support_file("Plugins"))
subdir = "voljanko/xlate"
langfile = File.new( File.join( plugdir, subdir, "fr1.lang" ))
langfile.puts( ["chars"].pack("U3") )

4 bytes should be written, the last should be 10.chr

langfile.close()`

You may also use IO.read or IO.readlines, but before unpacking, you need to chop() the linestring to remove the record separator ( a "\n" char.)
ADD:
lines = IO.readlines( File.join( plugdir, subdir, "fr1.lang" )) lines.each do |line| UI.messagebox( line.chop.unpack("U3") ) end

3) Your datafiles DO NOT belong in the Plugins folder. Create a subfolder for them.

voljanko

The problem was in the file,not in the code.
I have saved the file in notepad as UFT-8 ,so I can "unpack" the character.
I have tried to save the file in other formats (unicode,ANSI,unicode big endian) and is always giving me errors.
So only UFT-8 is ok.
Problem solved