I think this problem should be solved in LC 7 (possibly using normaliseText); but I need a solution that I can ship now (and it's been threatened that LC 7 will 'fix' a 'bug' which isn't, so I'm not sure if I'll ever able to use it).

My app processes some data from - and then, re-organised, to - UTF8 text files. Occasionally it needs to insert a constant string; and for various reasons (all of them excellent) I want to specify these constant strings in the script. So far, so good. Now however one of these constant strings needs to contain a character which is not in ASCII. Actually two of them. So I need to express a UTF8 string in my script. And I'm searching for an elegant way to do this.

My constant string used to look something like this:

   constant kMyConstantString = "This is my ice cream"

but now it needs to read something like
   constant kMyConstantString = "This ice cream is (c) Ben and Jerry's Inc"

(only with a smart apostrophe and a proper copyright symbol).

I thought I could just about manage with this

put uniDecode(uniEncode("This ice cream is © Ben and Jerry’s Inc, "ANSI"), "UTF8") into kMyConstantString

(that is, encode from ANSI to Unicode, then from Unicode into UTF8).

I tested it on Mac and it seemed to work. The UTF8 file was generated and this text came out just right.


However, it turned out that when the code was compiled and run on Windows, the copyright symbol came out OK, but the apostrophe came out as o-tilde.

This is because uniEncode(..., "ANSI") is a lie; "ANSI" is meaningless; instead it interprets the source encoding as whatever is typical for the operating system. I wrote the script on Mac; in MacRoman, © is 0xA9 and smart apostrophe is 0xD5; in ISO-8859-1 (and UTF8), 0xA9 is ©, but 0xD5 is o-tilde.

So... what's the most elegant way to this (is there one)? Is there any alternative to just looking up the UTF8 encodings and writing:

put format("This ice cream is \xC2\xA9 Ben and Jerry\xE2\x80\x99s Inc") into kMyConstantString

?

TIA,

Ben

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