KnowledgeInbox (By Tarun Lalwani)

Yesterday (24th June 2008), one of SQAForums member had an query for changing the file format of any file from ANSI to UTF-8. Below is the link to the same query

http://www.sqaforums.com/showflat.php?Number=493915

Though i replied to the poster to do it using DotNetFactory but there was something that was still making me feel uneasy. With in few mins i knew what was making me feel uneasy, it was NOT knowing how to actually do it. That was it and i opened my Visual Studio 2005 IDE. Started exploring various things in the object browser and finally with some R&D effort came up with very simple code to write files in desired encoding.

This article will explore how to write files in various formats UTF-7, UTF-8, UTF-32, ASCII, Unicode and Big Endian Unicode. All this code would be for QTP and we would be using DotNetFactory for creating the .NET Class objects

Step 1:

First stpe is to create an object of class System.Text.Encoding to get access to various encoding formats

'Create the .NET object for getting encoding formats
Set oEncoder = DotNetFactory("System.Text.Encoding")
 
'Get various encoding formats
With oEncoder
    Set UTF7 = .UTF7
    Set UTF8 = .UTF8
    Set UTF32 = .UTF32
    Set ASCII = .ASCII
    Set UNICODE = .UNICODE
    Set BigEndianUNICODE = .BigEndianUnicode
End With

Step 2:

Next is to create a file in desired format using System.IO.StreamWriter class of .NET. This can be done as illustrated in code below

'File to write to
sFileName = "C:\Test.txt"
 
'We don't want to append if file already exists. Just overwrite existing content
bAppendToExistingFile = False
 
'Encoding to use
Set oEncodingToUse = UTF32
 
'Create a file stream in required encoding format
Set oFile = DotNetFactory("System.IO.StreamWriter", , sFileName, bAppendToExistingFile, oEncodingToUse)
 
'Write something on the file
oFile.Write "Tarun "
oFile.WriteLine "Lalwani"
 
'Close the file
oFile.Close
 
'cleanup objects
oFile.dispose
Set oFile = Nothing
Set oEncoder = Nothing

Files that we create using different format might look same in a notepad, but they are not actually same in the way they are stored. To observe the difference we will use the Edit command of MS-DOS.

File encoded in UTF-32 format

Similarly we can also read files using System.IO.StreamReader class of .NET as shown in below code

'File to read from
sFileName = "C:\Test.txt"
 
'Encoding to use
Set oEncodingToUse = UTF32
 
'Create a file stream in required encoding format
Set oFile = DotNetFactory("System.IO.StreamReader", , sFileName, oEncodingToUse)
 
'Loop until we reach end of stream
While Not oFile.EndOfStream
 
    'Read and print line by line
    Print oFile.ReadLine()
Wend
 
'Close the file
oFile.Close
 
'cleanup objects
oFile.dispose
Set oFile = Nothing
Set oEncoder = Nothing

Above code would produce the below output in the QTP print window

Print window content for UTF-32 encoded file

DotNetFactory adds a lot of power to QTP, but to see the real beauty you need to unleash it yourself. This article is a mere example