Viewing Encoded Text Files in Web Browsers

Unicode Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Encoding Conversion Programs for Encoded Text Files

∟Viewing Encoded Text Files in Web Browsers

This section provides a tutorial example on how to view text files with different encodings with Web browser Internet Explorer. The encoded text file should be modified to add proper HTML tags using the sample program EncodingHtml.java.

Now, we have our greeting messages saved in many different encodings. The next question is how do display them as glyph of the corresponding languages on the screen. One of the ways I have used in the past is to run a multi-language enabled Web browser like IE to view the text files. To do this, we have to mark up the text into a html file, by using a program like this one:

/* EncodingHtml.java
 * Copyright (c) 2019 HerongYang.com. All Rights Reserved.
 * 
 * This program allows you to mark up a text file into an HTML file.
 */
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
class EncodingHtml {
   static HashMap charsetMap = new HashMap();
   public static void main(String[] a) {
      String inFile = a[0];
      String inCharsetName = a[1];
      String outFile = inFile + ".html";
      try {
         InputStreamReader in = new InputStreamReader(
            new FileInputStream(inFile), inCharsetName);
         OutputStreamWriter out = new OutputStreamWriter(
            new FileOutputStream(outFile), inCharsetName);
         writeHead(out, inCharsetName);         
         int c = in.read();
         int n = 0;
         while (c!=-1) {
            out.write(c);
            n++;
            c = in.read();
         }
         writeTail(out);
         in.close();
         out.close();
         System.out.println("Number of characters: "+n);
      } catch (IOException e) {
         System.out.println(e.toString());
      }
   }
   public static void writeHead(OutputStreamWriter out, String cs)
      throws IOException {
      out.write("<html><head>\n");
      out.write("<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\""+
         " content=\"text/html; charset="+cs+"\">\n");
      out.write("</head><body><pre>");
   }
   public static void writeTail(OutputStreamWriter out) 
      throws IOException {
      out.write("</pre></body></html>\n");
   }
}

Now, let's compile this program and run it with hello.utf-8:

C:\herong>javac EncodingHtml.java

C:\herong>java EncodingHtml hello.utf-8 utf-8
Number of characters: 84

If you have installed IE with the Chinese language support, you should be able to open the output file, hello.utf-8.html, and enjoy reading the messages in English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

Then, run EncodingHtml.java with other encodings,

C:\herong>java EncodingHtml hello.gbk gbk
Number of characters: 84

C:\herong>java EncodingHtml hello.big5 big5
Number of characters: 84

C:\herong>java EncodingHtml hello.shift_jis shift_jis
Number of characters: 84

View the output files with a Web browser, and compare the results:

hello.utf-8.html - Browser sets View/Encoding to utf-8. All messages are perfect.
hello.gbk.html - Browser sets View/Encoding to gb2312. All messages are perfect.
hello.big5.html - Browser sets View/Encoding to big5. Simplified Chinese message has two bad characters.
hello.shift_jis - Browser sets View/Encoding to shift_jis. Both Simplified and Traditional Chinese messages have bad characters.