Thomas, be careful with conversion to ASCII if not changing the encoding info of the XML file. If you identify explicitly in the XML file that the file is encoded in UTF-8, you must save it in UTF-8 or you will have bad characters.
For example the German umlauts are encoded with 2 bytes in UTF-8, but with a single byte in standard ASCII mode. But a single byte German umlaut is only displayed correct, if the user who opens the XML file has the code page for Western European language active.
For all UltraEdit/UEStudio users out there in the world editing in a Unicode format without to really knowing what Unicode is, please do following:
First read the
FAQ about UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 & BOM to get the basic knowledge you need.
Second in UltraEdit or UEStudio open
Configuration - File Handling and set following options:
Conversions
Uncheck the 2 EBCDIC options if you are not editing EBCDIC files, but check the option
On Paste convert line ending to destination type (UNIX/MAC/DOS).
DOS/UNIX/MAC Handling
Set the
Default file type for new files to whatever you prefer.
Set the
Unix/Mac file detection/conversion to
Automatically convert to DOS format to avoid problems with copy and paste with other windows applications.
Uncheck
Only recognize DOS terminated lines (CR/LF) as new lines for editing.
Save
Uncheck
Write UTF-8 BOM header to ALL UTF-8 files when saved.
If
Write UTF-8 BOM on new files created within this program (if above is not set) should be enabled or not depends on the type of Unicode files you are creating. If you create for example only XML and HTML type files (HTML, HTML, PHP, ASP, ...) in UTF-8, you should uncheck this option, because then the encoding should be defined inside the file with
encoding="UTF-8" (XML) or with
content="text/html; charset=utf-8" (HTML). See FAQ above for details about BOM and when it should be used.
Enable
Save file as input format (UNIX/MAC/DOS). That's important because we convert every file automatically to DOS for editing, but we want to save it in the original format and not in DOS format. This option is moved from the Save to the DOS/UNIX/MAC Handling configuration dialog in v12.10 of UltraEdit!
You can set option
Trim trailing spaces on file save to whatever you prefer. Normally it is good to activate it because it can reduce the file size a little bit which is interesting for HTML files.
Temporary Files
Use the second option
Open file without temp file but prompt for each file and set the
Threshold for example to 4096 (4 MB). You can set the threshold value to a higher value if your computer has enough performance and your hard disk is fast and you often edit large files.
Unicode/UTF-8 Detection
Enable
Auto detect UTF-8 files,
Detect Unicode(UTF-16) files without BOM and
Detect ASCII/ANSI files with Escaped Unicode. You can disable for example the UTF-16 detection if you are sure that you will never edit a UTF-16 file. Every enabled detection increases the file load time of normal ASCII files. But if you don't know what format your files have, it is better to let UE/UES automatically detect it.
The 3rd option
Disable automatic detection of HEX file format on reload is not important for handling Unicode files.
