Question

I have this mapping in my C# application


string [,] unicode2Ascii = {
{ "ஹ", "\x86" }
};


&#3001 – is the unicode value for a tamil literal “ஹ”. This is the raw hex literal for the unicode value saved by MS Word as a byte sequence. I am trying to map these unicode value “strings” to a hex value under 255 (so as to accommodate non-unicode supported systems).

I trying to use string.replace like this:

S = S.replace(unicode2Ascii[0,0], unicode2Ascii[0,1]);

However the resultant ouput has a ? instead of the actual hex 0x86 stored. Any pointer on how I could set the encoding for the second element of that array to something like windows-1252?

Or is there a better way to do this conversion?

thanks in advance

Answer 1

Not sure if this helps, but the Tamil codepage “57004 – ISCII Tamil” is supported by Windows.

It does not give the same translation for the example character above though. For ‘ஹ’ it gives 216. Perhaps a different codepage needs to be used?

        string tamilUnicodeString = "ஹ";

        Encoding encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("x-iscii-ta");

        byte[] codepageBytes = encoding.GetBytes(tamilUnicodeString);

Update

If you wish to take a unicode file as input, transliterate characters to get a single byte representation, the following should do the trick. The resulting array should have your single byte representation if your dictionary encodes each character:

        Dictionary<char, char> lookup = new Dictionary<char, char>
        {
            { 'ஹ', '\x86' },
            { 'இ',  '\x87' },
            //next pair...,
            //etc, etc.
        };

        string input = "ஹஇதில் உள்ள தமிழ் எழுத்துக்கள் சரியாகத் தெரிந்தால்";

        char[] chars = input.ToCharArray();

        for (int i = 0; i < chars.Length; i++)
        {
            char replaceChar;

            if (lookup.TryGetValue(chars[i], out replaceChar))
            {
                chars[i] = replaceChar;
            }
        }

        byte[] output = Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1").GetBytes(chars);