Steel Bank Common Lisp

>Is there a tutorial somewhere on writing non-ascii characters to a file?
>
>I have latin-1 encoded characters in a db, and I'm not sure how to write
>those out.  I can use flexi-streams:string-to-octets and back, but how can
>I use with-open-file to write the correct characters to a text file?
>
>Sorry if this is a simple question, but this is my first foray into
>encoding, and I'm sticking with SBCL to do it.
>

you can either say :external-format or use :element-type

In the first case you specify encoding, in the second type you simply 
use (unsigned-byte 8) and write octets

On 4 December 2011 17:48,  <jcm@...> wrote:
> Is there a tutorial somewhere on writing non-ascii characters to a file?
>
> I have latin-1 encoded characters in a db, and I'm not sure how to write
> those out.  I can use flexi-streams:string-to-octets and back, but how can
> I use with-open-file to write the correct characters to a text file?

So, first you get stuff from the DB.

If it arrives as raw octets you can just use pass :ELEMENT-TYPE
'(UNSIGNED-BYTE 8) WITH-OPEN-FILE to write it to file using its
original (in this case latin-1) encoding. If you must write it in, say
:UTF-8 instead, you need to first convert it to a string using eg.
SB-EXT:OCTETS-TO-STRING with :EXTERNAL-FORMAT :LATIN-1 and then
proceed as in the next paragraph.

If it arrives as correctly decoded string, pass :EXTERNAL-FORMAT
:UTF-8 to WITH-OPEN-FILE instead. (Or :LATIN-1, or whatever encoding
you want to write it in.)

If it arrives as an /incorrectly/ decoded string, then you need to
figure out where it goes wrong, and make sure the right external
format is used there.

Cheers,

 -- nikodemus

Thank you both for your answer.  The initial issue I had was quickly solved.

I'm trying to use this knowledge for a web app as well.  I have to present
a web page in a number of languages, and accept input.  I might even have
to allow for (as an example) someone at an arabic configured machine to
enter their name in mandarin.  I would assume I need everything in UTF-8
at that point.  But how can I get those characters to appear correctly in
the terminal, file or web browser?

For latin-1, it's fine.  I can see the brazilian characters in my user's
name.  But will the same approach handle non-roman characters just as
easily?