Re: Simple string conversion from UCS2 to ISO8859-1

On 2/22/25 6:29 AM, David Brown wrote:

As for why not use UTF-8, the answer is clearly simplicity.  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.
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If the incoming SMS's are just being logged, or passed out in some other way, then UTF-8 may be a convenient alternative.
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 I would ssy the big difference is that an 8-bit character set needs to only store 256 glyphs for its font. Converting to UTF-8, would still require storing some massive font, and the need to decide exactly how massive it will be.