Utf 8 to text converter online how to#

In this way, a UTF-8 string can be converted to GSM-7, using the best possible replacement character instead of simply dropping the character altogether, or using a generic replacement. (ASCII is fully represented by GSM-7.) Once the UTF-8 character has been transliterated to ASCII, the GSM-7 value of that ASCII character is provided using a mapping. If the character does not have a GSM-7 equivalent, it is transliterated to ASCII. If the character has a GSM-7 equivalent, the GSM-7 value of that character is provided using a mapping. The library takes a UTF-8 string, and examines each character separately. This was achieved through direct 1-to-1 conversion of GSM-7 supported characters, and then transliteration to handle the remainder. In the end, I decided to write a custom library to handle conversion from UTF-8 to GSM-7, which would allow for replacement characters which were as close as possible to the original UTF-8 character. Normally, I would opt to use something like iconv to convert between encodings, but iconv does not natively support GSM-7.

Utf 8 to text converter online how to#

While not ideal, using a close replacement character is clearly much preferable to using just a question mark.Д«ut how to achieve this conversion? Very few resources exist to convert UTF-8 to GSM-7, much less do so with the sort of flexibility we had in mind. For instance, вЂ PME NegГіciosвЂ would become вЂ PME Neg?ciosвЂ. This was a much better alternative than a вЂlossyвЂ™ conversion from UTF-8 to GSM-7 which would likely result in the replacement character вЂ ?вЂ being used for the Portuguese-language characters which did not exist in GSM-7. A SMS message such as вЂ PME NegГіciosвЂ could be displayed as вЂ PME NegociosвЂ without rendering the message unintelligible. The SolutionДЄfter some discussion with target Portuguese speakers who had mobile handsets with the telephone company, we discovered that it was acceptable to use a close replacement character for the Portuguese-language specific characters which the telco did not support.ДЇor example, for the purposes of SMS messages, it was acceptable to replace вЂ ГЎвЂ with вЂ aвЂ, вЂ ГівЂ with вЂ oвЂ, and вЂ ГЈвЂ with вЂ aвЂ. A replacement character would be used to indicate that no valid character existed in the GSM-7 encoding to represent the given UTF-8 character. Finally, we could not use one of the newer features of GSM, national language shift tables, as the telephone company did not support them either.Дoing a standard conversion to from UTF-8 to GSM-7 would be вЂlossyвЂ™ in that the characters which did not exist in GSM-7, but did exist in UTF-8 could not be represented. We could not use other encodings which did support the Portuguese language, such as UCS-2/UTF-16 as the telephone company did not support them. We could not very well just ask people to not send Portuguese-language specific characters which did not exist in GSM-7 - that would be tacky and very user-unfriendly. The challenge was to send Portuguese language SMS messages from the SME Toolkit to end-user mobile handsets via the telephone company without rendering the SMS message unreadable. The Portuguese language utilizes characters which are not represented in the 7-bit GSM Default Alphabet, yet GSM-7 was the only way we could communicate SMS messages to the telephone company. The challenge arose from the fact that, internally, the SME Toolkit uses the UTF-8 encoding scheme, and we were trying to communicate Portuguese language messages. Recently, we experienced the challenge of needing to communicate SMS messages to a telco utilizing the 7-bit GSM Default Alphabet. As blogged about previously, the SME Toolkit has a feature which allows integration with telephone companies to send SMS messages via the SMPP protocol.