Introduction
I wanted to read
Turkish news inside a console devoid of all the pictures and flashy signs. Just
text. I looked around and didn't find a tool that does this. This project puts
together freely available code snippets for different parts of the project. If you downloaded the binary distribution,
Please create a shortcut link of the exe file (MyCSrss.exe) and change the font to LUCIDA CONSOLE to see the
Unicode characters.
The Work Behind
One of the
surprising challenges was actually displaying Turkish Unicode fonts. The
solution seems to be using the kernel32.dll API [1]. I move a set of functions
into the Turkish.cs file, but all that's needed is one function:
This function can
display Unicode characters inside a console window as long as the font property
of the console is set to TrueType font, such as Lucida Console font. I added into Turkish.cs all the special
Turkish characters that are not in the regular ASCII using the ISO 8859-9 to
Unicode document[2] :
|
Small Letters
|
Capital Letters
|
|
c_with_cedilla
|
C_with_cedilla
|
|
g_with_breve
|
G_with_breve
|
|
i_without_dot
|
I_with_dot
|
|
o_with_diaeresis
|
O_with_diaeresis
|
|
s_with_cedilla
|
S_with_cedilla
|
|
u_with_diaeresis
|
U_with_diaeresis
|
The font property of
the console is changed by right-clicking the top-left corner of the console
window and selecting "Properties", and then the "Font" tab:
It is possible to
add more fonts to the console as long as they are fixed-width fonts [3]. But Lucida is perfectly fine to display all
of the Turkish letters:
Code that created
the above is:
Reading RSS Feed
Microsoft's
System.Net[4] and System.Xml.Linq[5] are easy to use libraries to read an RSS
XML page and parse, respectively.
I wrapped relevant
static functions inside the RSS class, which is in the RSS.cs file. RSS class has one public method:
Where rss_sites is an array of strings that are URL
addresses for the RSS feeds. It should be noted that when using an
HttpWebRequest object, setting its Proxy to null makes it much faster[6].
Sometimes the
"description" element in the RSS feed is cluttered with other XML
elements I am not interested in. To strip away these StripTagsCharArray[7]
function is used.
Putting It All
Together
I don't like the way
the system automatically positions the console window. I adjusted the
specifications to my liking by right-clicking on the top-left corner of the
console window and selecting properties, and then selecting 'Layout':
Running the app
returns with a list of Turkish economic news from a Turkish newspaper[8]. This overwhelmed the console window, so I
limited the output to 10 news line using a constant MAX_NEWS inside RSS.cs. If you
press return enough many times you will then see CNN World News[9].
I tried to make
program.cs as simple as possible:
What it returns is
what I was hoping to find before I started working on it:
When I tried to test
the release version of the exe in a clean environment, it quickly became
evident how annoying it would be for the user to manually go and change the
console properties. How do you change
the console font automatically? This question was asked and a worthy attempt
was made to answer it using undocumented
kernel32 calls [11]. So I incorporated
interesting function prototypes into
this project, but ultimately didn't use them because they didn't really do what
I wanted. There is also a way to change the console's font using the registry,
but I don't like this solution.
Earlier I had tried
to use a shortcut link and change the font from there using the environment
variable %CD%[10], but the shortcut property for the working directory wouldn't
accept it. I tried scripting to a create [12] shortcut link but the API doesn't
seem to support changing the font. That is why I couldn't include a shortcut
link in this package. If you wish to
keep the Lucida font setting in your console, create a shortcut link and change
the font to Lucida in its properties. Then each time you double click the
shortcut, instead of the main MyCSrss.exe, you will see the Turkish fonts.
References
[1]: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/04/07/9989346.aspx
Aug. 9, 2013
[2]: ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/ISO8859/8859-9.TXT
Aug. 9, 2013
[3]: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/stupid-geek-tricks-enable-more-fonts-for-the-windows-command-prompt/
Aug. 10, 2013
[4]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.httpwebrequest.aspx
Aug. 10, 2013
[5]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.linq.xdocument.aspx
Aug. 10, 2013
[6]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1119347/how-to-perform-a-fast-web-request-in-c-sharp
Aug. 10, 2013
[7]: http://www.dotnetperls.com/remove-html-tags
Aug. 9, 2013
[8]: http://rss.hurriyet.com.tr/rss.aspx?sectionId=4
Aug. 10, 2013
[9]: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_world.rss
Aug. 10, 2013
[10]: http://libertyboy.free.fr/computing/reference/envariables/
Aug. 10, 2013
[11]: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/pavely/archive/2009/07/23/changing-console-fonts.aspx
Aug.10, 2013
[12]: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244677
