Problems with string encoding - need the text content in char* format.

Question

The problem is non ASCII-characters, which comes out as some sort of unicode I need to desipher.
Here's what I got:
A text frame object with the TextString "Agnartjørna"
I get the text content of this object into an ai::UnicodeString the following way:
AIErr
VMGetTextOfTextArt( AIArtHandle textArt, ai::UnicodeString &ucStr)
    ASUnicode *textBuffer = NULL;
    AITRY {
        TextFrameRef ateTextRef;
        AIX( sAITextFrame->GetATETextFrame( textArt, &ateTextRef));
        ATE::ITextFrame ateText( ateTextRef);
        ATE::ITextRange ateRange = ateText.GetTextRange( true);
        ASInt32 textLen = ateRange.GetSize();
        AIX( sSPBlocks->AllocateBlock( (textLen+2) * sizeof( ASUnicode), nil, (void**) &textBuffer));
        ateRange.GetContents( textBuffer, (ASInt32) textLen+1);
        /* trim off trailing newlines */
        if ((textBuffer[textLen] == '\n') || (textBuffer[textLen] == '\r'))
             textBuffer[textLen] = 0;
        ucStr.clear();
        ucStr.append( ai::UnicodeString( textBuffer, textLen));
        sSPBlocks->FreeBlock( textBuffer);
        textBuffer = NULL;
       AIRETURN;
    AICATCH {
        if (textBuffer) sSPBlocks->FreeBlock( textBuffer);
       AIPROPAGATE;
Now, the next step is to convert it into a form that I can use to call regexp.
Baiscally, I want to detect the ending "tjørna" (meaning small lake) on a map label, and apply a standard abbevriation "tj^a" (with "a" superscripted).
So the problem is to obtain the regexp pattern and the text content in same encoding.  And since the regexp library is old *char based, I would like to convert the text content in to plain old *char.
Hence the following code:
static AIErr
VMAbbreviateTextArt( AIArtHandle textArt,
                         vmTextAbbrevEffectParams *params)
    AITRY {
    /* first obtain the text contents of the textArt */
       ai::UnicodeString ucText;
      const int kTextLen = 256;
      char textContent[kTextLen];
      AIX( VMGetTextOfTextArt( textArt, ucText));
      ucText.as_Roman( textContent, kTextLen);
But textContent now has the value "Agnartj\xbfnna"  (According to XCode),
which will not get a match on the pattern "tj([øe][rn])na\\" (with  backslash matching the end of the string)
Any other ways to convert the textContent to a plain *char string?

Answer 1

Thank you very much, your method will work fine. with
the "UTF-8" parameter the byte[].length is double,
cause every valid byte is preceeded by an -62, but I
will just filter the valid bytes into a new array.
Thanks again,
StefanActually what you need to do is to find the character encoding that your device expects, and then you can code your strings in Arabic.
That's the way Java does things; Strings and char values are always in UNICODE (see www.unicode.org) (which means \u600 to \u6ff for arabic) and uses a specified character encoding when translating these to and from a byte stream.
Each national character encoding has a name. Most of them are identical to ASCII for 0-127 and code their national characters in 128-255.
Find the encoding name for your display and, odds are, the JRE has it in the library.
BTW the character encoding ISO-8859-1 simply maps UNICODE characters 0-255 on to bytes.