AsciiConverter

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Description:

About AsciiConverter:

AsciiConverter is a program to convert text plain files between nearly all types of OS codepage formats and end of lines styles.

End of line styles
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OS's end lines differently. Windows end line are CRLF (Carriage Return, Line Feed), while BeOS or UNIX flavors end line with a LF. Finally Mac OS Classic end line with a CR

BeOS,UNIX (LF)
Windows (CRLF)
Macintosh (CR)

AsciiConverter allows you to change ends of lines for your text files.

Codepages
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ASCII is a charset where the first 128 codes (0..127) are standard all around the world, but the high codes are different in each country.

To complicate things more differents OS use different codepages for each country. For example MS-DOS use codepage MSDOS 850 for Spain but Windows and UNIX use codepage ISO-8859-1.

To solve this problem UNICODE (http://www.unicode.org) has standardized every symbol all around the world using UNICODE table, but UNICODE uses 2 bytes for each letter (65536 different symbols included arabic, japanese and chinese), but compatibility is not supported and spends twice as much memory.

UNICODE also releases UTF8 a backward compatible codepage who using only 1 byte per letter to allow to represent every UNICODE symbol.

How did they do it? The trick was to use low codes (0..127, it's to say 0xxx xxxx), standard around the world, to represent low codes (how are equals in all codepages, included UNICODE) and 2 or 3 bytes to represent high codes (those who are different).

The first byte is always 1xxx xxxx to mark the begin of a high code. This way we could represent every UNICODE symbol.

BeOS natively use UTF8 who keep compatibility with low symbols in others codepages, but not with high codepages.
Because BeOS use UTF8, BeOS could represent every UNICODE symbol.

Details about this version:

In this new version we have added an AddOn to execute AsciiConverter directly from the Tracker as well as using the command line executable.