With vEdit you can translate some Unicode files (e.g., for English, French, German, Italian, etc.) into ASCII, or from ASCII into Unicode.
In all variations of ASCII, each character is represented by one byte, which allows up to 256 different characters.
In “Unicode”, each character is represented by two bytes, which allows up to 65,536 different characters, which is enough to represent characters in Chinese and Japanese.
Unicode has been used for some English, French, German, Italian, etc. text files which really only need 256 different characters. In this case the upper byte of each Unicode character is zero (00 hex).
vEdit can only translate Unicode files in which the upper byte of each Unicode character is zero (00 hex). vEdit is unable to translate Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. Unicode files that need both bytes.
Translate a File from Unicode to ASCII
- Open the Unicode e.g. File > Open.
- You will notice that every other character is readable text. In between you will see either “nul” or spaces, depending upon your display font.
- Select Block > Select all or Ctrl-A to mark the entire file as a block.
- Select Edit > Translate > Unicode to ASCII to translate the file to the ASCII character set.
- Translate a file from ASCII to Unicode with Edit > Translate > ASCII to Unicode.
The Unicode / ASCII translation is performed by the supplied macros unic-asc.vdm and asc-unic.vdm.
Translating Files