National character support problem

General JUCE discussion
1

Hi living in Denmark I’m forced to live with 3 special characters æøå.

It works fine in my JUCE apps while I stay at my Ubuntu machine.

My editor stores the danish charaters in UTF8 (my LANG=da_DK.utf8) Dump of my source file using hd (hexdump) file shows e.g ‘æ’ as the 2 bytes 0xc3 0xa6.

A few days ago I tryed compiling an application for windows. Here danish characters don’t show properly.

E.g. ‘æ’ is shown like the two characters ‘Ã|’

Question is what can I do in JUCE to get around this problem. Seing my source code in Visual Studion at Windows, danish characters are shown correctly.

I’ve here added a minor example showing an app having the problem:

/* ==============================================================================
  * Demonstrating problems with DK chars in JUCE
  * ==============================================================================
  */

#include "includes.h"

class MainComponent  : public Component,
                       public ButtonListener
{
public:
    //==============================================================================
    MainComponent () : dkCharLabel (0),quitButton (0)  {
   	    addAndMakeVisible (dkCharLabel = new Label (String::empty,T("Dk chars (6 chars): >æøåÆØÅ<")));
   	    addAndMakeVisible (quitButton = new TextButton (String::empty));
   	    quitButton->setButtonText (T("Quit: æøåÆØÅ"));
   	    quitButton->addButtonListener (this);
  	    setSize (600, 300);
   	}

    ~MainComponent() {
        deleteAndZero (dkCharLabel);
    }


    void paint (Graphics& g){}
    void resized() {
    	dkCharLabel->setBounds (152, 80, 296, 48);
        quitButton->setBounds (getWidth() - 176, getHeight() - 60, 120, 32);
    }

    void buttonClicked (Button* buttonThatWasClicked)  {
        if (buttonThatWasClicked == quitButton)
        {
            JUCEApplication::quit();
        }
    }

    juce_UseDebuggingNewOperator

private:
    Label* dkCharLabel;
    TextButton* quitButton;

    MainComponent (const MainComponent&);
    const MainComponent& operator= (const MainComponent&);
};

class DkCharTestWindow  : public DocumentWindow
{
public:
    //==============================================================================
	DkCharTestWindow()
        : DocumentWindow (T("DK Char Test >æøåÆØÅ<"),
                          Colours::lightgrey, 
                          DocumentWindow::allButtons,
                          true)
    {
        MainComponent* const contentComponent = new MainComponent();

        setContentComponent (contentComponent, true, true);

        centreWithSize (getWidth(), getHeight());

        setVisible (true);
    }

    ~DkCharTestWindow() {}

    //==============================================================================
    void closeButtonPressed()
    {
        JUCEApplication::quit();
    }
};

class DkCharTestApplication : public JUCEApplication
{
	DkCharTestWindow* dkCharTestWindow;

public:
	DkCharTestApplication() : dkCharTestWindow (0) {}
    ~DkCharTestApplication() {}

    void initialise (const String& commandLine)
    {
    	dkCharTestWindow = new DkCharTestWindow();
    }

    void shutdown()
    {
        if (dkCharTestWindow != 0) delete dkCharTestWindow;
    }

    //==============================================================================
    const String getApplicationName()    {return T("Dk Char Test"); }
    const String getApplicationVersion() {return T("1.0"); }
    bool moreThanOneInstanceAllowed()    {return true; }
    void anotherInstanceStarted (const String& commandLine) {}
};

START_JUCE_APPLICATION (DkCharTestApplication)
2

It’s not a library problem - if the compiler had correctly compiled that wide-char literal, then juce would certainly have got it right, same as on linux. Sounds like the VS compiler is treating the file as some other encoding, even if the editor is getting it right.

3

Solution:

  1. Try the TRANS macro around an english text
  2. In your initialization, build a LocalizedString object to load the danish translation
  3. Open the danish translation file with an UTF-8 capable editor (like Notepad++ on Windows, or KWrite / Gedit on linux), and make sure to save as UTF-8 with NO BOM.

Run the software: It works.

4

Thanx X-Ryl669

Your suggestion solves my problem and also answer a not yet published question about “localizing” my apps (if I ever get that far in my playing around - but I have had the thought)

The LocalisedStrings class and TRANS was unknown to me, but I’ll certainly now start using it throughout all my source