Fetch Softworks

Uploading UTF-8 files (7 posts)

• Started 21 years ago by LizCastro
• Latest reply 19 years ago from Jim Matthews

• LizCastro Member

  I just realized that when I upload UTF-8 files, Fetch does some weird conversion of the non-ASCII (perhaps non- ISO 8859-1) characters, and thus they display incorrectly.

  I've been able to solve the problem by deselecting the "Translate ISO characters" in the Misc preferences panel, but wondered if you could give me more information about this feature, since it seems that this feature is important when uploading files with other encodings.

  Thanks,
  Liz

  (Author of HTML 4 for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, and others, in which I recommend Fetch to my readers and explain how to use it.)

  Posted 21 years ago #

• Jim Matthews Administrator

  Thanks for the plugs! Here's information on the Translate ISO Characters option from Fetch Help:

  ISO Translation

  Many computers, including the Macintosh, can display special characters that are important for communicating in Roman languages besides English (for example, accented vowels). Unfortunately, different computers use different codes to refer to these characters. So, unless special translation is performed, a filename or text file that looks fine on one computer can be a garbled mess on another.

  Fetch provides the Translate ISO Characters option in Preferences to address this problem. When this option is enabled, Fetch will translate special text characters between the Macintosh standard and the ISO 8859-1 character code, a standardized code set for these characters. It has been adopted by some computer manufacturers, and others support it as a "neutral ground" between incompatible codes. If Fetch is connected to one of these machines, the special characters should translate perfectly.

  Note that Fetch only translates text file contents and filenames. Binary files (such as compressed text files) are not translated, and text files must be transferred in Text (or Automatic) mode for translation to occur.

  The ISO-to-Mac and Mac-to-ISO translation tables are stored in 'taBL' resources with IDs 1001 and 1002, respectively. If you need to translate with a computer that uses some character set besides ISO 8859-1, you can edit these tables. The two tables should be the inverse of each other, so that an upload-download cycle results in the same file that you started with.

  NOTE: The Translate ISO Characters option will garble texts in character sets other than ISO 8859-1 (such as ISO 2022-jp), and so should be turned off when transferring texts in those character sets.

  Thanks,

  Jim Matthews
  Fetch Softworks

  Posted 21 years ago #

• LizCastro Member

  Thanks, that's very helpful. I had found the info for the preference in the Help files, but had flown right past the ISO Translation entry.

  And thanks for Fetch. I've been using it for years, and it's a great tool. I hope I've sent some users your way.

  best,
  Liz

  Posted 21 years ago #

• LizCastro Member

  So does that mean that a file created with, say BBEdit, saved without any special settings, and then uploaded with this option activated (since that is the default) is effectively "encoded with ISO-8859-1".

  This is significant for me since (X)HTML files are supposed to declare, in a meta tag, which encoding the file is in.

  thanks,
  Liz

  Posted 21 years ago #

• Jim Matthews Administrator

  The setting does not have any effect if the file only uses the ASCII character set -- more or less the characters you can type on a Mac without holding down the Option key. There's only an issue if the file contains so-called 8-bit or high-bit characters, for example accented vowels. By default BBEdit will encode these in the MacRoman character set, which is Mac-specific. If you upload with Fetch, and have Translate ISO Characters chosen, Fetch will change those characters to their equivalent in the ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin-1) character set. In that case, if the file was an HTML file you'd want to declare its encoding as ISO-8859-1. HTML entity codes are another way to specify such characters (for example you can type é rather than the letter e with an acute accent).

  I hope this helps,

  Jim Matthews
  Fetch Softworks

  Posted 21 years ago #

• Slugger Member

  Fetch is definitely ethnocentric!

  I've tried the translate ISO pref on and off but it makes no difference. Everytime I download a french or spanish language file, Fetch changes every accented character into gibberish.

  Another problem I'm having is, thinking my problem might be with BBEdit, I changed my preferred text editor to PageSpinner. Finding no joy there I wanted to go back to BBEdit but Fetch won't let me.

  Do I need an exorcist?

  Posted 19 years ago #

• Jim Matthews Administrator

  If you turn Translate ISO off Fetch won't change any of your accented characters. But it could be that your files are in one encoding, and the program you are using to display them thinks they are in another encoding, with the result that you see gibberish.

  BBEdit 8.0 has an Encoding sub-menu in the File Options pop-up menu that lets you see what encoding BBEdit is using, and change it.

  When you say that Fetch won't let you change your preferred editor, what exactly is happening? Are you using the command in the Obscure Options pop-up menu in the Misc. section of Preferences?

  Thanks,

  Jim Matthews
  Fetch Softworks

  Posted 19 years ago #