CODEWITHSUNDEEP
encodingcharacter-encodingarabicwindows-1252
Rangana Sampath
Rangana Sampath

Reputation: 1467

converting arabic words to windows-1252

I'm inserting large amount of data to a oracle database.

In that database text is stored in windows-1252 format.

It turns out that there are lot of things to be entered, all of them need to be converted to this format. Also all of those data is in Arabic words.

can some one help me to find a online converter or a tool that encodes Arabic words to windows-1252 format?

*hope the details are enough

--rangana

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2702

Answers (2)

Jukka K. Korpela
Jukka K. Korpela

Reputation: 201798

Since windows-1252 does not encode Arabic letters at all, the only way to do the conversion would be to use some kind of transliteration. This is something completely different from encoding conversion (which does not change the identity of characters, only their coded representation).

There is a large number of transliteration (romanization) schemes for Arabic. Almost all of them non-reversible, and almost all of them not suitable for fully automatic processing (mainly because normal Arabic writing does not indicate short vowels but most transliteration schemes indicate them, i.e. the transliterator needs to know how the word is pronounced and to insert vowel characters).

You could fake a conversion by converting to windows-1256 and then inserting the windows-1256 encoded data into the database as raw bytes. You would then need to keep track of the encoding of each value in the database, so that you know which bytes are windows-1252 and which are really windows-1256. This sounds like a mess, so consider whether it is possible to convert the data base to use UTF-8.

Upvotes: 1

CloudyMarble
CloudyMarble

Reputation: 37576

The pair of Win32 APIs, MultiByteToWideChar and WideCharToMultiByte, allow you to convert code-page encoding to Unicode and Unicode data to code-page encoding, respectively. Each of these APIs takes as an argument the value of the code page to be used for that conversion. You can, therefore, either specify the value of a given code page (example: 1256 for Arabic) or use predefined flags such as:

  • CP_ACP: for the currently selected system Windows code page
  • CP_OEMCP: for the currently selected system OEM code page
  • CP_UTF8: for conversions between UTF-16 and UTF-8

Upvotes: 1

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