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