Support for several file encodings
Liberty BASIC v5.0 adds support for different file encodings in addition to ASCII which is the only encoding that prior versions of Liberty BASIC support. For LB5 the default is ISO 8859-1 as a gentle compromise because it can also read straight 8-bit encodings such as ASCII. In addition to ISO 8859-1, the encodings for ASCII, UTF-8 and MS-CP-1252 can also be specified.
The specifiers for the ENCODER keyword are:
Encoding name
Specifier
ASCII
ASCII
ISO 8859-1 ISO8859_1
UTF-8
UTF_8
CP-1252
MS_CP_1252
The encoding can be specified in the OPEN statement with use of the new keyword ENCODER, as shown:
'specify UTF-8 as the encoding for
reading myfile.dat
open "myfile.dat" for input as #1 encoder = utf_8
Note: Liberty BASIC does not automatically know which encoding to use. If ISO8859_1 will not work for a given file, you must know which encoding to specify.