Writing Unicode to an RTF file
The man page for [cpan://RTF::Writer] doesn't discuss this, but what if you want to create an rtf file containing unicode text in some obscure language that uses a wacko writing system? I played with a sample unicode file (in Thai), managed to load it into MS Word and "Save as ... RTF"; this showed me the rtf expression for unicode characters. Well, all we have to do is express our non-ascii unicode characters that way, pass the result to RTF::Writer, and we're done...
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use RTF::Writer;
die "Usage: $0 file.txt\n (this will create file.rtf)\n"
unless ( @ARGV and $ARGV[0] =~ /\.txt$/ and -f $ARGV[0] );
# input file is expected to be utf8
open( I, "<:utf8", $ARGV[0] ) or die "$ARGV[0]: $!";
my $utf = do { local $/; }; # slurp it
# here's the magic part: replace each wide character with
# "\uN\5f", where "N" is the decimal numeric codepoint:
$utf =~ s/([^[:ascii:]])/sprintf("\\u%d\\'5f",ord($1))/eg;
( my $out = $ARGV[0] ) =~ s/txt$/rtf/;
my $rtf = RTF::Writer->new_to_file( $out );
my @pars = split( /\n+/, $utf );
$rtf->prolog( title => $out );
for my $par ( @pars ) {
$rtf->paragraph( \$par ); # need to pass $par by reference
}
$rtf->close;
Is that easy, or what?
Re: Writing Unicode to an RTF file
created: 2006-02-02 05:59:48
++ - I wish I'd seen this about a year ago ;-)
Bear in mind that RTF expects signed 16-bit values for character codes, which has bitten me more than once in the past. It's also worth pointing out that MS Word, in particular, will choke if you don't follow each Unicode character with its "ansi equivalent", which you're achieving with the '\5f' in your sprintf - most of the other RTF-aware editors I experimented with showed no such restriction.