Text to speech with Chinese characters

Question

In reference to this post. 

I am just starting to wrestle with this problem. The referenced post gives the background. I have three questions.

First, I want to make sure I understand the output of the defined function. Base on the given example would the input to the text to speech function be "&#597D;Ḅ&#FF01;..."?

Second, I will have files in UTF-8 format, which is variable length in general. Although for Chinese characters I believe it will be 16 bits encoded into 3 bytes. When reading such a file using C/C++ will all the characters just be converted to a fixed 16 bit character format in memory.

Third, is there a standard function or library call that will do this conversion. It seem a little inconvenient for Microsoft to require an input format nobody supports.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, to the Unicode format. UTF-8 is encoding to translate numbers into binary. Unicode is a character set for translating characters into numbers and UTF-16 is 16-bit encoding, variable-width. They are different things and Microsoft have their own definition, due to a long history. Unicode is now the second most popular format and popular with non-Windows developers. So I presume Unicode ingress format means a wider appeal.

There are lots of string encoding/decoding methods in most languages, such as system.Web.httputility. Loads of libraries for C++, etc which ye olde search tool will provide.

Regards,
Pete

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#PEJL
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