How can I create a ANSI encoded text file in UWP?

ghz 8months ago ⋅ 61 views

I'm currently working on a UWP project and would like to create a text file in ANSI charset (Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1).

The reader of this file only supports ANSI. If the reading side now expects the ANSI format and receives special characters in UTF8 encoding, these ANSI characters from 160 to 255, will be interpreted incorrectly.

In the UWP world you need this:

StorageFile file = await DownloadsFolder.CreateFileAsync("Test.txt");await Windows.Storage.FileIO.WriteTextAsync(file, "Hällö", Windows.Storage.Streams.UnicodeEncoding.Utf8);

Unfortunately, only Unicode encodings can be used here, not ANSI! The alternative would be

using (TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter(p, true, Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1")))

However, this is not allowed out of the UWP sandbox.

So, is there a way to create a simple text file from an UWP application that uses the ANSI character set (Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1)?

Does anyone have an idea?

Regards Torsten

Answers

In a UWP (Universal Windows Platform) application, the default encoding for writing text files is UTF-8, and it doesn't directly support writing files in ANSI encoding (such as Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1).

However, you can achieve this by using a workaround. You can create a temporary file with UTF-8 encoding and then convert its contents to ANSI encoding before saving it to the final destination. Here's how you can do it:

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;
using Windows.Storage;
using Windows.Storage.Pickers;

namespace YourNamespace
{
    public class YourClass
    {
        public async void CreateAndSaveANSITextFile()
        {
            // Create a temporary file with UTF-8 encoding
            StorageFile tempFile = await ApplicationData.Current.TemporaryFolder.CreateFileAsync("temp.txt");
            await FileIO.WriteTextAsync(tempFile, "Hällö", UnicodeEncoding.UTF8);

            // Read the contents of the temporary file
            string text = await FileIO.ReadTextAsync(tempFile);

            // Convert the text to ANSI encoding (Windows-1252)
            byte[] ansiBytes = Encoding.GetEncoding("Windows-1252").GetBytes(text);
            string ansiText = Encoding.GetEncoding("Windows-1252").GetString(ansiBytes);

            // Save the ANSI text to the final destination
            FileSavePicker savePicker = new FileSavePicker();
            savePicker.SuggestedStartLocation = PickerLocationId.Downloads;
            savePicker.FileTypeChoices.Add("Text file", new System.Collections.Generic.List<string>() { ".txt" });
            StorageFile destinationFile = await savePicker.PickSaveFileAsync();
            if (destinationFile != null)
            {
                await FileIO.WriteTextAsync(destinationFile, ansiText);
            }
        }
    }
}

In this code:

  1. We first create a temporary file with UTF-8 encoding using FileIO.WriteTextAsync.
  2. Then, we read the contents of the temporary file and convert it to ANSI encoding (Windows-1252) using Encoding.GetEncoding("Windows-1252").
  3. Finally, we save the ANSI-encoded text to the final destination using FileIO.WriteTextAsync.

This way, you can create and save a text file in ANSI encoding from a UWP application.

#uwp