fprintf save file as UINT16 or UTF16

Hello all,

I am writing a parameter text file that is later used by some really really old C code I'm using. The code needs the parameter text file to be saved as UTF-16 (uint16) I believe. My current methodology is the following:

f = fopen(fid,'w'); 
fprintf(f,'REAL parameter_first = 5\n'); 
fclose(f);

In terminal a quick file -bi file.params text/plain; charset=us-ascii

How do I save it as a UTF-16 ?? Thank you in advance!!

Answer 1

[Jan]

There is no unique identifier to mark a text file as UTF16. Note that UINT16 is something different. Try this:

f = fopen(fid,'w');
fwrite(f, ['REAL parameter_first = 5', char(10)], 'uint16');
fclose(f);

This uses UINT16 as format, but this works only because Matlab uses UINT16 to store CHAR variables.

Does your import program need a "BOM"? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark#UTF-16

[Noam Greenboim]

For adding a BOM, see here:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/75708-update-bom-for-unicode-text-files

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

Guessing about the byte order:

f = fopen(fid, 'w', 'ieee-be', 'UTF-16BE');

fprintf(f, 'REAL parameter_first = 5\n');

fclose(fid)

Matters get more complicated if you need to write out characters whose code points are above 255: in such a case you need to use fwrite(), and the task of converting codepoints is most easily done with unicode2native() to produce a sequence of uint8 that you fwrite()