Re: XyWWWeb.U2 version 118 released (6 November 2005)

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Correo Fenda  on Mon, 07 Nov
2005 23:08:56 +0100


> Very nice feature, Robert! One of the most popular U2 utilities is
> CLIP/CLIPW that provides easy communication with the Windows clipboard.
> In the past, using CLIP from standard XyWrite, it was necessary to run
> the ANSI2XY utility to convert Ansi characters to CP850 (or 437). Now,
> CLIP automatically converts ANSI Windows characters to standard XyWrite
> characters, unless you have switched the registry entry 1252=N to
> 1252=Y.

Well, thanks. The CLIP revision in this version of U2 makes me really happy.
I've been using it for three months now, without a single hitch. You can now
transparently Copy and Paste back and forth between web pages, MS Word, and the
whole computing world, with correct characters moving in both directions
(correct translation between CodePages). And it has the flexibility to handle
*any* CodePage-to-XyWrite conversion (though this would not ordinarily be
needed). That's a godsend. (The feature is available _only_ with a new
version of CLIP.EXE for Xy4, which is required to use CLIP with v118:
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/CLIPW32.ZIP ).

It might amuse you to read my private comment to Carl about this back in
August, which describes the method:

"... This is really tricky code. Turns out that CodePage conversion is not
something Microsoft allows programmers to do. There is no API that does it
overtly. However, there are obscure APIs (MultiByteToWideChar,
WideCharToMultiByte) for converting double-byte charsets (Japanese, Chinese,
Korean) to Unicode and then back to double byte DBCS; and these (almost
incidentally) do have inter alia a CodePage argument. I discovered that if I
treated a single-byte charset (English, French) as if it were Chinese, Windows
doesn't barf. So what I do is convert, e.g., 1252 to Unicode, and then Unicode
to 437. Damned if it doesn't work. I'm ROTFL, because in Google Groups
absolutely NOBODY can figure out how to do this. Microsoft's documentation of
these APIs is dead wrong, for one thing. A lot of their MSDN docs have gross
errors... "

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