Writing file with the encode command

You can use the Action Script command action uses file encoding to specify the encoding in which to write files when using the appendfile and createfile until commands.

The encoding is effective until another encoding is specified. If you do not use the action uses file encoding command, the appendfile and createfile commands create files in the local encoding.

The command syntax is:

action uses file encoding encoding [ NoBOM ]

The encoding might be any name which ICU can recognize, such as ISO-8859-1, Shift_JIS, and UTF-8. After created, the file objects can be used as regular file objects and you can apply any operations applicable to text files.

To turn off the encoding change and reuse the local encoding, you can set the encoding keyword to local.

If any of the UTF encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32) is specified as the value of encoding, the file to be created will have a BOM (Byte Order Mark) at the head of it. If the client local encoding is UTF-8 and no encoding is specified in an action, files to be created with the action will be written in UTF-8 without BOM.

To suppress adding any BOM, you can use the option NoBOM (case-insensitive) following the value of encoding. The NoBOM option is effective only with any UTF encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32), and it is ignored if it is used with any other encoding name.

The following action creates a files using the Windows-1253 (Greek) encoding:

delete "{(client folder of current site as string) & "/__appendfile"}"
action uses file encoding Windows-1253	
appendfile Κόκκινο ου?ανό τη ν?χτα
delete C:\encode_test.txt
move __appendfile C:\encode_test.txt

The following action creates two files the first using the Windows-1253 (Greek) encoding, the second using the local encoding:

delete "{(client folder of current site as string) & "/__appendfile"}"
appendfile Following lines contains Greek language strings 
action uses file encoding Windows-1253 	
appendfile Κόκκινο ου?ανό τη ν?χτα
move __appendfile C:\Greek_test.txt
// switch to local encode
delete "{(client folder of current site as string) & "/__appendfile"}"
appendfile Following lines contains English strings 
action uses file encoding local 
appendfile  Am I writing a local US strings now !
delete C:\tmp\local_test.txt
move __appendfile C:\tmp\local_test.txt

The following action creates a file using the UTF-8 encoding without a BOM:

delete "{(client folder of current site as string) & "/__appendfile"}"
action uses file encoding UTF-8 noBOM	
appendfile Hello world !!
delete /tmp/encode_test.txt
move __appendfile /tmp/encode_test.txt