• From: James Clark <jjc@j...>
• To: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>, xml-dev@l...
• Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 13:33:01 +0700

> The Java way to handle this is to stop thinking of a Java char as
> representing a Unicode character. It doesn't. A Java char represents a
> UTF-16 code point, which may be a surrogate. The public API to
> java.lang.String is essentially a UTF-16 API. For example, the length()
> method of a string does not return the number of Unicode characters in
> the string. Rather it returns the number of UTF-16 code points. A string
> containing a single Plane-1 character has length 2 in Java.

I agree with this analysis.

Much more problematic than java.lang.String is java.lang.Character.  An API 
like

  java.lang.Character.isLetter(char ch)

doesn't work too well once you have letters outside the BMP. The JDK ought 
to have a class representing a Unicode character (scalar value).

Unfortunately .NET (System.Char) has the same problem.

James

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