converting codepage 437 to standard ASCII

[spperl]

I'm struggling with a character encoding issue. Basically the text I am trying to manipulate contains extended ascii characters which are invalid with the database encoding (unfortunately I have no control over this)

Without applying a brute force search and replace does anyone know of any neat ways to convert extended ASCII into the ASCII equivalent?

e.g. e' to e

Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

 

[MillerH]

Brute force is the only way that I know to do it since there are no rules for such a translation. Simply create a hash with however you want the translation done and then use a regex convert strings. You can add an additional regex to filter out any extended ascii characters you didn't choose to translate.

Here's a snippet of code I use to translate such things into html codes. You can adapt it to your purpose:

my %html_ext_chars => (
	chr(192) => 'À',
	chr(224) => 'à',
	chr(193) => 'Á',
	chr(225) => 'á',
	chr(194) => 'Â',
	chr(226) => 'â',
	chr(195) => 'Ã',
	chr(227) => 'ã',
	chr(196) => 'Ä',
	chr(228) => 'ä',
	chr(197) => 'Å',
	chr(229) => 'å',

	chr(200) => 'È',
	chr(232) => 'è',
	chr(201) => 'É',
	chr(233) => 'é',
	chr(202) => 'Ê',
	chr(234) => 'ê',
	chr(203) => 'Ë',
	chr(235) => 'ë',

	chr(204) => 'Ì',
	chr(236) => 'ì',
	chr(205) => 'Í',
	chr(237) => 'í',
	chr(206) => 'Î',
	chr(238) => 'î',
	chr(207) => 'Ï',
	chr(239) => 'ï',

	chr(210) => 'Ò',
	chr(242) => 'ò',
	chr(211) => 'Ó',
	chr(243) => 'ó',
	chr(212) => 'Ô',
	chr(244) => 'ô',
	chr(213) => 'Õ',
	chr(245) => 'õ',
	chr(214) => 'Ö',
	chr(246) => 'ö',

	chr(217) => 'Ù',
	chr(249) => 'ù',
	chr(218) => 'Ú',
	chr(250) => 'ú',
	chr(219) => 'Û',
	chr(251) => 'û',
	chr(220) => 'Ü',
	chr(252) => 'ü',

	chr(223) => 'ß',
	chr(199) => 'Ç',
	chr(231) => 'ç',
	chr(209) => 'Ñ',
	chr(241) => 'ñ',
	chr(253) => 'ý',
	chr(255) => 'ÿ',
	chr(191) => '¿',
	chr(161) => '¡',
);

my $html_ext_chars_re = '(' . join('|', map {"\\x" . sprintf("%lx", ord $_) . ""} keys %html_ext_chars) . ')';

sub escape_html_ext_chars {
	s/$html_ext_chars_re/$html_ext_chars{$1}/g for (@_);
}

- Miller