Re: Unicode handling in Java running on Windows 98/95

Sourav,
I am a little unsure of what your last question means.
Here's my stab at an answer for you.

1) Yes, Java uses Unicode internally and therefore files in other
encodings need to be converted.

2) Whether the OS supports Unicode is irrelevant, since Java can provide
the conversion on its own. However, although Win 95, 98 are not fully
Unicode, the OS does support encoding conversions to/from Unicode.

3) Since Java requires Unicode for its character processing, why ask
about not converting?
If you are asking whether it wouldn't be better for Java to not require
Unicode be used internally, the answer is no.
If Java supported other encodings internally, all of the text-based
functions would have to be implemented multiple times to accomodate the
different encodings and their processing requirements. It would take
much longer to produce Java environments for each platform and the sum
of Java's functionality would would not have been created so quickly.
And it would be much less portable.

tex

souravm wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> Here is one doubt regarding character conversion in Java.
> 
> So far as I know all the strings in Java are in Unicode. So strings in
> any other encoding will be converted to Unicode in Java.
> For example I may have a file which has strings written in Shift_JIS. I
> can user InputStreaReader to read this file specifying that encoding for
> strings in this file is Shift_JIS. So when I created a Java string which
> holds a string in this file, that Java string will be in Unicode which
> is converted from Shift_JIS.
> 
> Now this is all ok if underlying OS supports Unicode. But how this
> concept work if the underlying OS itself does not support Unicode, like
> Windows 95, Windows 98 ?
> 
> In that case is it always better not to do any conversion of encoding in
> Java classes running in Windows 98 ?
> 
> Please comment.
> 
> Regards,
> Sourav
> 

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Received on Thursday, 21 February 2002 01:34:36 UTC