Japanese Mac devices uses and generates files in UTF-8. Most non-english websites now have a UTF-8 charset on HTML as it solves character problems. It contains all possible characters resulting in larger set of values per character compared to single language based encoding such as Shift JIS. UTF-8 is compatible on any devices worldwide. ConvertToUTF8 package allows reading, editing and saving files to Shift JIS. On the file menu, this will be visible after the package installation.
How to view a Shift JIS encoded fileĭifferent editors have different ways to view Shift JIS. When opening a text, csv, doc, xmls file received from a Japanese client, the characters will most likely appear garbled that is because devices outside Japan are not Shift-JIS compatible. Most devices in Japan are Shift-JIS compatible, and Windows devices in particular outputs files with a Shift-JIS encoding. Shift JIS (SJIS) is an encoding system for Japanese Characters. Thankfully, on the web, HTML5 encourages the use of UTF-8 charset and viewing different characters on the web are not a problem anymore. In this case, for developers who doesn’t speak any Japanese, it is almost impossible tell if they’re garbled or not until the client sees it. When opening on a non-japanese device, sometimes instead of question marks and symbols, the garbled characters turn into a different Chinese character. They will most likely send files encoded in Shift JIS because that is how Japanese devices generate files. Offshore developers from Japanese company will for sure face the problem of garbled characters. Imports System.TextModule Module1 Sub Main() Dim name As String = "ÉΩ" Dim utf8 As New UTF8Encoding() Dim encodedBytes As Byte() = utf8.GetBytes(name) Dim decodedString As String = utf8.There are several Japanese character encoding, but Shift JIS and UTF-8 are the two important ones. Imports System.TextModule Module1 Sub Main() Dim name As String = "ÉΩ" Dim utf8 As New UTF8Encoding() Dim encodedBytes As Byte() = utf8.GetBytes(name) Dim decodedString As String = utf8.GetString(encodedBytes) End SubEnd Module I appear the encoding UTF8 is using some sort ofĮncoding scheme that doesn't use the unicode character code. And the resulting string exactly matches the original string. The array equals 0xC389CEA9 instead of 0x03A900C9. Imports System.TextModule Module1 Sub Main() Dim name As String = "É" Dim utf8 As New UTF8Encoding() Dim encodedBytes As Byte() = utf8.GetBytes(name) Dim decodedString As String = utf8.GetString(encodedBytes) End SubEnd Module You character will move from the 2nd character to the 4th character. Will get 4 character instead of the original 2 characters. When you read the byte array back to a string you The converted byte array will look the same.
If we had a string with the greek letter omega 0x03A9 followed by your character 0xC9 the string would look like this : 0x03A900C9 (two character). Ascii characters have the MSB bytes of the character equal to zero. Two byte characters are considered unicode character. A character in the Net library is two bytes wide with a private property the indicates
the code will cause problems if your string contains unicode character.