Displaying unicode characters from a txt file

Programming Questions

kvanderbi..

Displaying unicode characters from a txt file

in Programming Questions • 1 year ago

Hi,

I am trying to display an en dash. It works when I use the unicode straight in process, but not when it's pulling from a txt file. How can I get it to pull the en dash from the txt file?

Here's my code:

PFont helvetica;

void setup() {

size (400, 400);

background(255);

helvetica = loadFont("Helvetica-12.vlw");

String[] testtext = loadStrings("test.txt");

textFont(helvetica);

fill(0);

text("1 \u2013 2 days", 50, 200); //this displays the en dash

text(testtext[0], 50, 100); //this displays "\u2013"

my txt file just has 1 line of text:

1 \u2013 2 days

Replies(7)

jbum

Re: Displaying unicode characters from a txt file

1 year ago

It sounds like you're saying you literally typed (or pasted)

\ u 2 0 1 3

into your text file.

If so, that won't work. When you use that in a string in your code, it gets converted to the unicode character. This doesn't happen to text that you load in from a file.

Try using the saveStrings() function to save some strings that contain emdashes to a file.

Then compare the file produced this way (which will contain correct emdashes) with the one you were

trying to read.

kvanderbi..

Re: Displaying unicode characters from a txt file

1 year ago

Thanks for looking at this.

I just tried what you suggested. It created a txt file with the following:

1 ‚Äì 2 days

When I save that and try to have processing read it, it doesn't work. It just writes out "1 ‚Äì 2 days".

jbum

Re: Displaying unicode characters from a txt file

1 year ago

Sounds like your text editor either doesn't support unicode or is defaulting to a different encoding.

Note: the file should work if you use it directly, without your text editor messing it up, right? It worked for me...

kvanderbi..

Re: Displaying unicode characters from a txt file

1 year ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "use it directly"?

If I just type straight into the code

text("1 ‚Äì 2 days", 50, 200);

it still doesn't work. Did you mean something else?

I'm just using mac's TextEdit. I just gave TextMate a try too and that didn't work either.

kvanderbi..

Re: Displaying unicode characters from a txt file

1 year ago

Oh, I just figured it out!

You're right, I can just type the en dashes in TextEdit.

They appear short like hyphens in TextEdit for some reason, so I had thought TextEdit was just creating hyphens.

Thanks for your help!

kvanderbi..

Re: Displaying unicode characters from a txt file

1 year ago

The dashes still weren't showing up in my "real" sketch, but now I've figured out that was an issue with my font loading and I've fixed it. Sorry for the slightly silly question, and thanks for helping me figure out that the problem was not with the txt file, as I'd thought!

PhiLho

Re: Displaying unicode characters from a txt file

1 year ago

As said, \u2013 in source code works because the compiler transforms it.
It won't work in text files (except properties files which are specially treated by Java, but that's another story).
In your text editor, you need to set the code page / encoding to UTF-8, which encodes Unicode chars to sequences of 8-bit Ascii chars, as you saw. Thus, it will read and write properly such files. I suppose that by default, it is set to your locale code page, likely to be ISO-8852-1 (or CP1252 if you are on Windows).