How to save a UTF-8 encoded text file ?

Question

hi People
I have a little script which reads the source text from a layer and saves it to a .txt file. This is on a Mac and all was good until recently when I tried opening the .txt file on a PC in Notepad and found my ˚ degree symbols all whack.
Resaving the .txt file in TextEdit as Unicode (UTF-8) encoding solved the problem, now opens fine in Notepad.
But ideally I'd like the script to output the .txt as UTF-8 in the first place. It's currently Western (Mac OS Roman). I've tryed adding in myfile.encoding = "UTF8" but the resulting file is still Western (and the special charaters have wigged out again)
any help greatly appreciated../daniel
    var theComp = app.project.activeItem;
    var dataRO = theComp.layer("dataRO").sourceText;
    // prompt user to save file
    var theFile = new File ("~/Desktop/"+ theComp.name + "_output.txt");
    theFile = theFile.saveDlg("Save an ASCII export file.");
    if (theFile != null) {          // check user didn't cancel dialog
        theFile.lineFeed = "windows";
        //theFile.encoding = "UTF8";
        theFile.open("w","TEXT","????");
        theFile.writeln("move details:");
        theFile.writeln(dataRO.value.toString());
    theFile.close();

Answer 1

Hi,
Got it, it seems, the utf-8 standard use 2-bytes (and more) encoding on accents and special characters.
I found some info there with some code http://ivoronline.com/Coding/Theory/Tutorials/Encoding%20-%20Text%20-%20UTF%208.php
However there was some error so I fixed it. (However for 3 and 4 bytes characters i didnt test it. So maybe you'll have to change back the 0xbf to 0x3f or something else.)
So here is the code.
Header 1
function convertCharToUTF(character){
    var utfBytes = "";
    c = character.charCodeAt(0)
    if (c < 0x80) {
        utfBytes =  String.fromCharCode (c);
    else if (c < 0x800) {
        utfBytes =  String.fromCharCode (0xC0 | c>>6);
        utfBytes +=  String.fromCharCode (0x80 | c & 0xbF);
    else if (c < 0x10000) {
        utfBytes = String.fromCharCode (0xE0 | c>>12);
        utfBytes += String.fromCharCode (0x80 | c>>6 & 0xbF);
        utfBytes += String.fromCharCode (0x80 | c & 0xbF);
    else if (c < 0x200000) {
        utfBytes += String.fromCharCode (0xF0 | c>>18);
        utfBytes += String.fromCharCode (0x80 | c>>12 & 0xbF);
        utfBytes += String.fromCharCode (0x80 | c>>6 & 0xbF);
        utfBytes =+ String.fromCharCode (0x80 | c & 0xbF);
        return utfBytes
function convertStringToUTF(stringToConvert){
    var utfString = ""
    for (var i = 0 ; i < stringToConvert.length; i++){
        utfString = utfString + convertCharToUTF(stringToConvert.charAt (i))
    return utfString;
var theFile= new File("~/Desktop/_output.txt");
theFile.open("w", "TEXT");
theFile.encoding = "BINARY"
theFile.linefeed = "Unix"
theFile.write("");//or theFile.write(String.fromCharCode (0xEF) + String.fromCharCode (0xEB) + String.fromCharCode (0xBF)
theFile.write(convertStringToUTF("Your stuff éàçËôù"));
theFile.close();