[jcifs] Character Set discussions

[Michael B. Allen]

On Sun, 09 Feb 2003 06:09:23 -0500
Eric <eglass1 at attbi.com> wrote:

> > What I'm concerned will happen is that an escape sequence like %C5%A5
> > will be converted into the Unicode characters U+00C5 followed by the
> > character U+00A5 rather than being converted to the single character
> > U+0165 as we intended.
> 
> isn't a method to UNescape the entire URI and return it.  There are 
> methods to access the different components in this fashion, however, and 
> they do interpret %HH%HHs as UTF-8 characters; you would do
> 
> String str = uri.getScheme() + ":" + uri.getSchemeSpecificPart();
> if (uri.getFragment() != null) {
>      str += "#" + uri.getFragment();
> }
> 
> Which will give you the input URI with all %HH%HHs unescaped and decoded 
> as UTF-8 -- basically, a Java string with the Unicode characters.

Ok. So it works. I'm a little surprised but I'm glad I was wrong. However
now I wonder if this behavior is locale depedant. Meaning if you do the
same thing in a Latin1 locale the escapes *are* interpreted as individual
characters rather than a UTF-8 sequence. They should be and I suspect
they will because that's trivial by comparison. In theory I suppose
this can work provided the escaping takes the locale and surrounding
characters into consideration. But I bet that was hairy peice of code. I
don't think I'm up to reproducing this in the smb Handler. Perhaps we
can backport the URI class.

> Whether you can do a System.out.println(str) successfully would depend 
> on console support, as you noted; obviously, the ability to output the 
> character is limited by the ability of the console to represent it. 
> Since I am able to do so, it looks fine on my screen.

Right. We are only concerned with how a Unicode string is handled
internally. Getting one from the colsole or displaying one correctly on
the console is a totally separable thing.

Mike

-- 
A  program should be written to model the concepts of the task it
performs rather than the physical world or a process because this
maximizes  the  potential  for it to be applied to tasks that are
conceptually  similar and, more important, to tasks that have not
yet been conceived.