[Solved] How to type or handle non-unicode characters

[larienna]

I am currently making a program that will use the ISO/IEC 8859-15 character set. The main reason is because the font needs to be hand drawn as a bitmap font due to the limited size, therefore, I don't want to draw 16000 characters for each font by hand. The ISO/IEC 8859-15 character set should support all European languages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-15

Now the problem is that when I am in a text editor or in Code::Blocks, if I type an accented character like é è à, it actually insert a Unicode character in the text. The main consequence is that my program will display 2 wacky characters instead of the right character, since Unicode use 2 bytes.

I want to be able to type ISO/IEC 8859-15 characters while programming and when editing text files. How can it be done?

If there is absolutely no way to avoid this, is there a way to dodge those Unicode characters programmatically. For example, if I detect a certain value in a byte, I skip it and read the next one.

[Aki]

Hello,

[..]
I want to be able to type ISO/IEC 8859-15 characters while programming and when editing text files. How can it be done?
[..]

You can set up the locale and its character encoding in your preferred code editor.

For example, this is the Kate editor (from the KDE project):

Replacing "Unicode [..]" with "8859-15" in the "Encoding" field should allow you to write programs in ISO/IEC 8859-15 character encoding.

Hope this helps.

[larienna]

I managed to changed the encoding in Code::Blocks after a lot of experimentation. This was my primary objective.

I am currently using Pluma as my main text editor and there does not seems to be any way to change the encoding. Even the Mate desktop environment does not seems to have any options to change the encoding.

I guess I have to change the encoding for each application that will modifies my data.

Thanks

[Aki]

Hello,

I managed to changed the encoding in Code::Blocks after a lot of experimentation. This was my primary objective.

I'm glad you sorted it out. :)

Please, mark the discussion as "solved" manually adding the text tag "[Solved]" at the beginning of the subject of the first message (after other tags, if any) adding a reference to ISO/IEC 8859-15 character encoding; for example:

[Solved] How to type or handle non-unicode characters (ISO/IEC 8859-15)

It would be better to open a new discussion for the next topic:

I am currently using Pluma as my main text editor and there does not seems to be any way to change the encoding [to ISO/IEC 8859-15]. Even the Mate desktop environment does not seems to have any options to change the encoding. I guess I have to change the encoding for each application that will modifies my data.

Yes, it was supported in the past, therefore it should be possible to support it a system level. You could try installing and configure the locales-all package that supply the following 8859-15 locales:

Code: Select all

$ apt-file list locales-all | grep '885915' | grep 'LC_CTYPE'
locales-all: /usr/lib/locale/en_DK.iso885915/LC_CTYPE
locales-all: /usr/lib/locale/en_GB.iso885915/LC_CTYPE
locales-all: /usr/lib/locale/en_US.iso885915/LC_CTYPE
locales-all: /usr/lib/locale/et_EE.iso885915/LC_CTYPE
locales-all: /usr/lib/locale/sv_SE.iso885915/LC_CTYPE

Then you can configure the default locale system to one of these locales with (root password is required):

Code: Select all

su -l -c "dpkg-reconfigure locales"