RE: Russian Text in VB6.0

From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Thu Mar 28 2002 - 07:04:13 EST


Barry James wrote:
> I have created a VB6.0 database application for WWF (World
> Wide Fund for Nature not World Wrestling Federation!).

Oh, well, if it is for the whales, I'll try to be helpful. :-)

> [...]
> My gut feeling is that I should stick with the Access 2000
> version and try to convert the strings within VB as I have
> more control over the VB forms than over the Active
> Reports.

It seems a sound choice. I think that the important question is now: what
does the "garbage" look like?

I know these two possibilities:

        1) It looks like empty squares;

        2) It looks like question marks.

In case 1, you just have a font problem: the Cyrillic characters are there
but the font you use doesn't have glyphs for them. Although I don't expect
that this is the problem, you could fix it by setting each control's font
face to a proper font. E.g.:

        cmdMyButton.Caption = "Чао а тутто ил мондо!"
        cmdMyButton.Font.Name = "MyCyrillicFont"

In case 2 (which is what I would expect), you have a conversion problem.
Unfortunately, VB controls up to 6.x do not support Unicode. Unicode is
supported internally (you can have Unicode strings), and it is supported the
conversion from Unicode to Windows' character set and vice versa, but the
controls themselves must be in one Windows character set. In this case, you
have to change each control's encoding *before* you set its text/caption
with Cyrillic text:

        Const charsetCyrillic As Integer = 204
        cmdMyButton.Font.Charset = charsetCyrillic
        cmdMyButton.Font.Name = ""
        cmdMyButton.Caption = "Чао а тутто ил мондо!"

Setting the font name to an empty strings causes the Font object to choose
the default font for the control's code page. Of course, you can also
explicitly set a font name that you know supports that code page.

I found value 204 by experimentation; unfortunately, I don't know where to
find a complete list of supported character sets, but here are the ones I
found out:

        Const charsetWestEurope As Integer = 0
        Const charsetDefault As Integer = 1
        Const charsetSymbol As Integer = 2
        Const charsetJapanese As Integer = 128
        Const charsetKorean As Integer = 129
        Const charsetChineseS As Integer = 134
        Const charsetChienseT As Integer = 136
        Const charsetGreek As Integer = 161
        Const charsetTurkish As Integer = 162
        Const charsetHebrew As Integer = 177
        Const charsetArabic As Integer = 178
        Const charsetBaltic As Integer = 186
        Const charsetCyrillic As Integer = 204
        Const charsetEastEurope As Integer = 238
        Const charsetDosBox As Integer = 255

Note that this approach implies that you keep the charset information
together with each language choice, and that you change each control's
charset each time that the language changes.

If it was my task, I'd prefer to have centralized code which loops through
all the forms and controls in the application to set their charset. E.g.:

        Sub setCharset(ByVal iCharset As Integer)
        On Error Resume Next
                Dim iFrm As Integer
                For iFrm = 0 To Forms.Count
                        Dim iCtl As Integer
                        Forms(iFrm).Font.Charset = iCharset
                        Forms(iFrm).Font.Name = ""
                        For iCtl = 0 To Forms(iFrm).Controls.Count - 1
                                Select Case
TypeName(Forms(iFrm).Controls(iCtl))
                                        Case "ActiveReport"
                                                ' (Or whatever the actual
type name is...)
                                                ' DO NOTHING
                                        Case Else
        
Forms(iFrm).Controls(iCtl).Font.Charset = iCharset
        
Forms(iFrm).Controls(iCtl).Font.Name = ""
                                End Select
                        Next iCtl
                Next iFrm
        End Sub

But perhaps you already a similar loop to set each control's caption with
localized strings. In this case, you can set the charset within the existing
code. Remember to set the charset before you set the caption!

Note that this approach implies that all forms are loaded (although not
necessarily shown) at start up, because the object <Forms> only contains
loaded forms. The form's menu should be just one more control, thus it
should be handled by the loop as well.

Hopefully, one version of VB will arrive one day whose controls are fully
enabled to Unicode and smart fonts. So, all this code could be put inside
<#If>'s so that it can be disabled when porting to newer Visual Basic.

I hope this helps.

_ Marco



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