Re: Accented characters in DOS

[Malcolm Dew-Jones <yf110@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, Luciano ES wrote:

> 	I use several DOS programs and always had a problem with
> accented characters. I often need to read some output and even, believe
> me, copy and paste it. It really bothers me when I run shell commands
> from a text editor that captures the output. It should be *very* useful,
> but this problem with accented characters really ruins the whole thing. 

You may be exchanging data between dos programs and windows programs.  I
think the code pages are different for dos and windows (even when using
dos within windows). 

So, a byte that displays as one character when viewed in a dos window does
not look the same when viewed in a windows application. 

Or said the other way round, for any latin character you want to type,
there are two different decimal values you need to enter from the
keyboard, depending of how to plan to view the data (yes, I know this is
impossible to do).

You could pass the data from the dos program through a filter to convert
the values, though I don't know of such a filter offhand. 

e.g.
    C:> create-dos-output | filter-2-windows > windows-compatible-file	


It gets harder if you want to type values at the dos command line and
compare them with the windows characters. 

    C:> filter-2-dos < windows-compatible-file > dos-compatible-file

        -- view the results in the dos windows
    C:> grep latin-word dos-compatible-file 

        -- save the results for use in windows
    C:> grep latin-word dos-compatible-file \
        | filter-2-windows > windows-compatible-output

Maybe jed has a way to write a function to convert a file while editing
it.  Write the text in dos, but convert and save as windows (or vice
versa).



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