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Home › Support › Why can't I open OPL programs written on my old Psion?

Why can't I open OPL programs written on my old Psion?

01 February 2006 · by Steve Litchfield
Applications, Miscellaneous, Upgrading Series 80

Q. Having upgraded from a Psion 5mx, I've been experimenting with my own OPL programs on my Nokia 9500 and have been trying to get these to read in files produced on my Psion. However, OPL on the the 9500 refuses to read these, giving a 'not supported' error. Surely text is text? What's going wrong?

A. Behind the scenes, the Nokia 9210, 9300 and 9500, and in fact every other Symbian device, uses Unicode, a different way of encoding text in files, using 16 bits per character rather than 8, principally so that a vastly greater number of international characters can be used. You can still open 8-bit text files on your 9500, using Documents (Word), which does a conversion on-the-fly, presenting the text properly.

However, OPL will need the text formatting properly using Unicode. The easiest way off doing this is to open your text file(s) in Windows WordPad and re-save using the specific format 'Unicode text'. Once saved, copy the files to a folder on your 9500 and try the OPL 'ioopen' command again. Incidentally, you can get a good picture of what's going on here by installing a hexadecimal file viewer/editor on either desktop or Communicator. For the latter, see the freeware HexView.