Re: Unicode Conversions

>

> Hello all,
> I have been trying to input unicode from a browser and store it in a database.  The problem is the different encodings used to represent the unicode.
> The input text is in the UTF-8 format.  I have read on the Microsoft support site that SQL Server 7.0 uses a different Unicode encoding (UCS-2) and does not recognize UTF-8
> as valid character data.  Of the solutions offered only two were of any use:
> 1) Convert between the two on input and output
> 2) Store as raw data in binary form
> I have been unable to get the raw data into the database correctly so decided to try the first option.  However although I keep reading that round conversion between the 2
> formats is quick, easy and reliable, i have been unable to accomplish this.  I am using JSPs, so the Session.Codepage command doesn't work, and anyway I would prefer a
> less platform specific solution.  Does anyone know of a way of converting a java string in UTF-8 to UTF-16 format.
>
I talk about it a bit in an older paper of mine, at
http://www.ibm.com/java/education/globalapps/Converting.html

You can either use the String API or Stream API. For Strings use:

String utf16chars = new String(utf8bytes[],"UTF8");

utf16bytes = utf16chars.getBytes("UTF8");


For Streams, use InputStreamReader
(http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/java/io/InputStreamReader.html)
or OutputStreamWriter.

> Also I was wondering if anyone knows why the UTF-8 can't be treated as a regular Latin1 string.  My database is set to use the Cp1252 code page, and so should this not
>
Whenever you mark bytes with the wrong codepage, you are likely to get
errors; any software that interprets or converts those bytes will get
the wrong answer. Using Cp1252 when what you are storing is either
UTF-8 or UTF-16 will give you problems.

> recognise the characters input to it? eg A japanese character in UTF-8 was broken down to ??? and these three characters are in the windows character set.  However by
> the time it reaches the database it is changed to ?    Does this mean that somewhere along the way the string is being changed into a different form where the character set
> doesn't support certain characters?   Does the fact that Java internally uses UTF-16(I think) cause any problems?
>
Java supports UCS-2, but UTF-16 is simply an extension of UCS-2, and
shares the same storage. The difference is not relevant to you here.

>
> Thanks for any suggestions,
> Stephen
> (If you have just gotten this message already I apologise but I was having difficulty with registration)
>

Received on Thursday, 7 September 2000 09:56:13 UTC