Encoding problem - change encoding?

[Jubinell]

Hi,

I'm using Excel 2007. I received a file from a client, it contains texts in the Vietnamese language. However when I open up the file it becomes gibberish (albeit still readable alphabetically).

Something like this:

chuyeân thieát keá gia coâng cheá taïo khuoân maãu vaø chi tieát maùy chính xaùc

should have been:
chuyên thiết kế gia công chế tạo khuôn mẫu và chi tiết máy chính xác.

I've been trying in vain to find a way to re-open this file with specifiable encoding options, but cannot find this function anywhere. Something like OpenOffice where you open and it asks you which encoding you want to open it in. Microsoft Word also asks sometimes if it sees something weird in the file.

 

[pgc01]

Hi Jubinell

Looking at your example it seems that the text you got is simply a text where you replace each vowel that has diacritics with 2 vowels, the second one also with a diacritic, but a common one in ansi tables.

eâ - ê
eá - ế
aã - ẫ

This is a simple procedure that allows you to write and read Vietnamese using the usual characters availabe in ansi tables.

I don't know Vietnamese, but if you received the document from a client this tells me that this must be some Vietnamese standard. This is used in other languages, to allow anyone to read a text with characters that are not common. For example in German, if you don't have the "ü" (the letter u with umlaut) you write instead "ue", like Bücher <-> Buecher.

In your case you just have to find the conversion table and use a simple vba procedure that replaces "eá" with "ế", "aã" wiht "ẫ", etc. Since you know Vietnamese it should not be difficult to find this table in the web.

 

[Jubinell]

As usual your keen eye for Unicode data comes to the rescue. It turns out I've been away from the country for too long.

There's a font somewhat becoming obsolete in Vietnam called VNI-TIMES. With it the text renders correctly; without it you see the gibberish I posted above.

The solution is either to download and use that font, or to convert. I found one converting site:
http://convert.holvn.org/

Thank you once again.

 

[pgc01]

I'm glad you have your problem solved.

If you want to write a code to convert the text to unicode I found this conversion table, that besides VNI has also other encodings:

http://vietunicode.sourceforge.net/charset/

 

[Jubinell]

That table is gold...for another long-term project later :D
Thank you.