Re: Mixing text and binary I/O

From:

"Mike Schilling" <mscottschilling@hotmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 15:21:06 GMT

Message-ID:

<CLiIg.3485$yO7.949@newssvr14.news.prodigy.com>

"Chris Uppal" <chris.uppal@metagnostic.REMOVE-THIS.org> wrote in message
news:44f18b44$0$634$bed64819@news.gradwell.net...

Ivan Voras wrote:

I don't know how to build this in general. It's mostly straightforward
to build for a specific encoding, say UTF-8, but CharsetDecoder has no
method that means "decode exactly one character". (I suppose you could
give it one

Hmm, ok. This is a slight problem (and IMO a candidate for rectifying),
but for my current purpose, I can limit it to UTF-8 and use the sort-of
implementation in DataInputStream.

Based on a previous attempt to use CharsetDecoder "raw", I suggest that
you at
least consider not using one at all, but doing your own UTF-8 {en/de}code
logic
instead.

Here's a place where I wish Java had output parameters; the signature I'd
want for readChar is

    /** @returns a character in the range 0 to 65535, or -1 at EOF
    * @param moreDecoded returns true if another character is available
without consuming more bytes
    */
    int readChar(out boolean moreDecoded);

As it is, I suppose a moreDecoded() method is the least of evils, i.e.
better than forcing the client to check that the returned character is in
the range D800-DBFF.