Re: [hybi] Multiplexing in WebSocket

[Greg Wilkins <[e-mail]>]

Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Greg Wilkins wrote:
>> * UTF-16 for those that can't deal with the uncertainty and/or
>>   unpredictability of the length of a UTF-8 string
> 
> Careful.  UTF-16 is a variable length encoding too.
> 
> It is possibly worse than UTF-8 for this, because everyone knows that
> UTF-8 is variable length, but many people seem to think UTF-16 is not.

OK that's worth a Wow!

I had assigned UTF-16 was fixed length because the java implementation
for it is.  But now I see in the java documentations:

 "The char data type (and therefore the value that a Character object
  encapsulates) are based on the original Unicode specification, which
  defined characters as fixed-width 16-bit entities. The Unicode standard
  has since been changed to allow for characters whose representation
  requires more than 16 bits. The range of legal code points is now
  U+0000 to U+10FFFF, known as Unicode scalar value. (Refer to the
  definition of the U+n notation in the Unicode standard.)

  The set of characters from U+0000 to U+FFFF is sometimes referred
  to as the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). Characters whose code
  points are greater than U+FFFF are called supplementary characters.
  The Java 2 platform uses the UTF-16 representation in char arrays
  and in the String and StringBuffer classes. In this representation,
  supplementary characters are represented as a pair of char
  values, the first from the high-surrogates range, (\uD800-\uDBFF),
  the second from the low-surrogates range (\uDC00-\uDFFF)."


So I'll modify my original point to

 * UTF-16 for java programmers and other BMP users that don't want to
   deal with the uncertainty and/or unpredictability of the length of
   a UTF-8 string


Thanks for the learning experience!

cheers