Detecting UniCode encoding

[Aryeh M. Friedman]

If I have an arbitary character (primative type not Character) array is
it possible to detect the encoding used for any given charcter in the
array. Specifically I am writting a parser that excepts abritary
strings of UniCode and it needs to know what character set to parse
against (decorater pattern and reflection). Please note I am brand
new to UniCode so if I asked the wrong way or what ever forgive me.

 

[Mickey Segal]

I am having trouble figuring out what your data looks like. Is it straight
Unicode with two bytes for every character? Or is it a variable length
Unicode encoding such as UTF-8? Or is it a restricted one byte encoding
where you are trying to guess the encoding?

 

[HK]

If I have an arbitary character (primative type not Character) array is
it possible to detect the encoding used for any given charcter in the

array.

If you are talking about a char[], there is no encoding
involved. It contains just characters.

If you are talking about a byte[] or an InputStream,
then indeed character encoding is involved. But then
you cannot derive from a single byte, which
encoding was used to encode characters. Looking at
several bytes you may be able to get a hunch of
which encoding is involved, but only if you
know beforehand that only a limited and known
number of encodings are possible. The reason is,
that in principle I can define my own encoding
with complete obtuse mappings between bytes
and characters.

Harald.