Skip to main content

Catching up with Java 5

Java 5 (a.k.a Tiger) has been around from a while. But there are still many developer's (including myself) who do not know about and use all it's features.

So, in an effort to educate myself and help others, I have decided to spend some time everyday reading Java 1.5 Tiger A Developer's Notebook, and share my findings with others on this blog.

Something I found out today (I know this should have happened long back, but such is the profession of programming :-) ), is that since Java 1.5 there is support for Unicode 4 which supports a supplemantary character set, that goes beyond 16 bits. An interesting implication is that a the char data type may no longer be able to hold all characters, because those in the supplementary range can now take upto 21 bits.

This means that a string that contains certain characters may have to encode them as 2 char data types. Such a pair of characters that represents one codepoint is known as a surrogate pair. Now a string with n codepoints may no longer be n characters long, because some code points will be encoded using one character, while some will use a surrogate pair.

A few questions have come to my mind about parsing such strings. How do I determine which codepoint appears in the middle of the String?

I came across this article that explains support for unicode 4 in Java. I will read it and share any interesting findings on this blog.

Meanwhile for a more general explanation of unicode, I strongly recommend this excellent article by Joel Spolsky: The absolute minimum every software developer absolutely, positively must know about unicode and character sets (no excuses!)

  • Discuss this post in the learning forum.
  • Check out my learning journal. I am learning JSF at the moment. Do you want to join an experiment in forming an adhoc virtual study group?
Note: This text was originally posted on my earlier blog at http://www.adaptivelearningonline.net
Here are the comments from the original post

-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Manjari
URL: http://simplymanjari.blogspot.com/
DATE: 08/17/2007 05:33:37 AM
Thanks for the link to Joel's article on Unicode. I discovered I was blissfully ignorant in that context.
-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Parag
DATE: 08/18/2007 06:31:12 PM
You are very welcome Manjari, and thanks for the comment :-)

--
Regards
Parag

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Running your own one person company

Recently there was a post on PuneTech on mom's re-entering the IT work force after a break. Two of the biggest concerns mentioned were : Coping with vast advances (changes) in the IT landscape Balancing work and family responsibilities Since I have been running a one person company for a good amount of time, I suggested that as an option. In this post I will discuss various aspects of running a one person company. Advantages: You have full control of your time. You can choose to spend as much or as little time as you would like. There is also a good chance that you will be able to decide when you want to spend that time. You get to work on something that you enjoy doing. Tremendous work satisfaction. You have the option of working from home. Disadvantages: It can take a little while for the work to get set, so you may not be able to see revenues for some time. It takes a huge amount of discipline to work without a boss, and without deadlines. You will not get the benefits (insuranc

Testing Groovy domain classes

If you are trying to test Grails domain class constraints by putting your unit test cases in the 'test/unit' directory, then your tests will fail because the domain objects will not have the 'valdate' method. This can be resolved in two ways: Place the test cases inside test/integration (which will slow things down) Use the method 'mockForConstraintsTests(Trail)' to create mock method in your domain class and continue writing your test cases in 'test/unit' What follows is some example code around this finding. I am working on a Groovy on Grails project for a website to help programmers keep up and refresh their skills. I started with some domain classes and then moved on to write some unit tests. When we create a Grails project using grails create-app , it creates several directories, one of which is a directory called 'test' for holding unit tests. This directory contains two directories, 'unit', and 'integration' for unit and

Planning a User Guide - Part 3/5 - Co-ordinate the Team

Photo by  Helloquence  on  Unsplash This is the third post in a series of five posts on how to plan a user guide. In the first post , I wrote about how to conduct an audience analysis and the second post discussed how to define the overall scope of the manual. Once the overall scope of the user guide is defined, the next step is to coordinate the team that will work on creating the manual. A typical team will consist of the following roles. Many of these roles will be fulfilled by freelancers since they are one-off or intermittent work engagements. At the end of the article, I have provided a list of websites where you can find good freelancers. Creative Artist You'll need to work with a creative artist to design the cover page and any other images for the user guide. Most small to mid-sized companies don't have a dedicated creative artist on their rolls. But that's not a problem. There are several freelancing websites where you can work with great creative ar