ANSI characters

[beserk1]

I am trying to make a script will print out a set of ansi characters, such as the ones shown here.

The following code doesn't seem to do what I want

For $i = 128 to 255 Step 1
    MsgBox(0, "", $i & @CR & Chr($i))
Next

It can display fine for $i < 128, but from 128 and onwards, all it gives me is blank.

Is there anyway to display these ansi characters?

[jchd]

Your script works fine and really should display correctly. What is your Windows version, language, codepage, default display font and did you change it?

[beserk1]

WinXP SP2, regional language is set to Chinese (Hong Kong S.A.R)

what do you mean language, codepage and default display font? is it setting from autoit?

[Valuater]

Most seem to work in English, but not all.

The language is based on what is installed

Run("notepad.exe")
WinWaitActive("")

For $i = 128 To 255 Step 1

    ControlSend("Untitled", "", "Edit1", $i & @CR & Chr($i) & @CRLF)

    Sleep(100)

Next

8)

[jchd]

WinXP SP2, regional language is set to Chinese (Hong Kong S.A.R)

Well, that seems to mean that your codepage is 950 defined as ANSI/OEM Traditional Chinese (Taiwan; Hong Kong SAR, PRC); Chinese Traditional (Big5) on MSDN.

If this is correct, then it's no surprise you see nothing. Look at this charset in the 0x00..0xFF range here. Codepage 950 is the big5 alphabet that doesn't map 1:1 to Unicode. Look here to understand why. The range 0x81..0xFF is used to introduce character codes > 0xFF and don't have meaning by themselves. MS calls his DBCS (double byte character set).

Hope this answers your questions.

[beserk1]

ok, so what do I need to change to my system in order to get this working as intended?

[jchd]

First, there is nothing "wrong" with your system: what you see seems perfectly as it should be, even is this disappoints you.

It all depends of what precisely _you_ intend to display. Spend some time to play with the charmap.exe standard windows applet, changing font and charset (using the "advanced" display. Depending on what support is installed on your system, you could see that every different codepage maps the character_value XX to different character representation. That's all the purpose of codepages: being able to represent cyrillic, western, arabic, indian, ... characters within a limited range.

The drawback is that if I give you a text file, I need to tell you which codepage it uses, or it will likely appear gribberish for you if your system doesn't use the exact same codepage.

The advent of Unicode (borrowing most of UCS) allowed a simple text file to use a unique representation (once a UTFencoding is chosen) for everyone, without having tomess with a large number of incompatible codepages.

To better understand the issue(s) here is some enjoyable reading that will enlighten you: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

You can also benefit of reading nearly every Joel article as well!

You can play with Unicode here.

[jchd]

Now if you really want/need to use, say, one of the Western Latin codepages, you could add support for other languages/input methods easily. Use the "language toolbar" or if this one is hidden, go to configuration panel, regional options (may be called otherwise for you) and look at options offered under Languages and Advanced tabs. Again, I don't have the same version as you, so your applets or menus could call differently.

[beserk1]

changed my language display to English, got it working, thanks