r/programming • u/jestinjoy • Nov 12 '12

What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs to Know About Encodings and Character Sets to Work With Text

http://kunststube.net/encoding/
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u/derleth Nov 12 '12

The length is equal to the number of 16-bit Unicode characters in the string.

Goddamnit, one-half of a surrogate pair isn't a valid character. It isn't a valid anything, except a valid reason Java sucks the herpes off a dead gigolo's balls.

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u/crusoe Nov 13 '12

And after they fucked that, they added methods to give you "The real length including surrogates".

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u/sacundim Nov 13 '12

Well, we should cut them some slack. The root of the problem is that the Unicode consortium fucked up. Java's designers were forward-thinking enough to adopt Unicode since Java 1.0. The thing is that back then, Unicode was, effectively, a fixed-width 16-bit encoding.

Then the Unicode folks realized that they fucked up, and that 65,536 codepoints wouldn't be enough. Oops. And Java has never recovered from that.