Character Conversion Overview

Converts text between Unicode and other character sets, and between 16-bit Unicode and the Unicode transformation formats UTF-7 and UTF-8. The API can be used to provide a list of all of the foreign character sets available on the device, to select a specific character set to convert to or from, then to do the conversion.

The Character Conversion Plug-In Provider API can be used to write plug-in DLLs. These extend the range of foreign character sets available for conversion beyond the ones already provided by the device.

The API has two key concepts: Unicode/non-Unicode conversion and Unicode format conversion.

This converts text between Unicode and another character set. Conversion can be performed on fragments of input, including handling the case when the input text is truncated midway through a multi-byte character. This allows clients to do conversion in small steps, which may be preferred for large amounts of text or when text is arriving in fragments from an external source.

Unicode format conversion is provided by CCnvCharacterSetConverter.

This converts text between Unicode (encoded using UCS-2) and the two Unicode transformation formats UTF-7 and UTF-8. These are ASCII-compatible encodings of Unicode which use sequences of multiple bytes to encode non-ASCII characters. As with the previous converter, conversion can be performed in incremental steps.

The Unicode format converter is provided by CnvUtfConverter.

Character Conversion Plug-In Provider Overview