Re: Simple string conversion from UCS2 to ISO8859-1

On 22.02.2025 12:29, David Brown wrote:

 
As the OP explained in a reply to one of my posts, he is getting data in
in UCS-2 format from SMS's from a modem.  [...]

(Yes. I wrote: "have got clear after a subsequent post".)

 
Whether Latin-1 or Latin-9 is better will depend on his application.

(Was also my stance upthread; "If that is possible for your context")

The
additional characters in Latin-9, with the exception of the Euro symbol,
are pretty obscure

ISTR they are some language specific symbols, so probably less obscure
to someone from those countries.

- it's unlikely that you'd need them and not need a
good deal more other characters (i.e., supporting much more of Unicode).

As for why not use UTF-8, the answer is clearly simplicity.

This was not my point (someone else suggested that). To me that was
clear; UTF-8 is an _encoding_ (as I wrote), as opposed to a direct
representation of a fixed width character (either 8 bit width ISO
8859-X or 16 bit with UCS-2). Conversions to/from UTF-8 are not as
straightforward as fixed width character representations are.

The OP is
working with a resource-constrained embedded system.  I don't know what
he is doing with the characters after converting them from UCS-2, but it
is massively simpler to use an 8-bit character set if they are going to
be used for display on a small system.  It also keeps memory management
simpler, and that is essential on such systems - one UCS-2 character
maps to one code unit with Latin-9 here.  The space needed for UTF-8 is
much harder to predict, and the OP will want to avoid any kind of
malloc() or dynamic allocation where possible.

You should address that to the other poster. :-)

Janis

 
If the incoming SMS's are just being logged, or passed out in some other
way, then UTF-8 may be a convenient alternative.