Re: DOS v Win encoding

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Wolfgang Bechstein
 on Sat, 27 Sep 2008 11:32:30 +0900


> Robert, if it is not too much trouble, I would be much obliged for some
> information on how to have CLIP.EXE convert to and from Unicode. I am of
> course not expecting you to duplicate my special environment (Japanese
> Win XP), but if you could give me some information about necessary
> switches, I can probably take it from there.
>
> Hat in hand,
>
> Wolfgang Bechstein

I am looking into this, and am aware of your earlier message.
Just busy with other things right now. Can you nail down
whether the Nipponese version of XP is using UTF-8 or not? Are
you in Japan? Ask somebody! Surely they know and must deal
with this all the time... UTF-8 is not Unicode! But I think
you can convert to UTF-8 using Clip, if the UTF-8 CodePage
(65001) is installed. Go into DOS and find out what CodePages
are installed. Command "CHCP" by itself, to determine your
current CodePage, then "CHCP #", where "#" is a CodePage. Try
1252, 850, 437, 942 (local Japanese), and others (1390, 1399,
290, 930, 939, 65001). What is available, i.e. installed on
your machine?

> I believe (but I am not sure about that) that the Windows
> clipboard in this case is UTF-8 rather than ANSI based,
> and that this is causing the problem.

I'd be surprised. The common understanding is that since NT
v5.0 (Win2000), Windows has written strings internally -- e.g.
on the text Clipboard (there's more than one system clipboard,
you know) -- in Unicode. Since Unicode embraces Japanese,
Chinese, Korean, etc, why would MS abandon Unicode in the
Japanese version of Windows? But again, UTF-8 is not the same
as Unicode...

R.

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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