How to write Unicode

[Stefan Ram]

When writing into a Unicode text file, given that the Stream
encoding was set to »UTF-8«, what is the proper, best or
canonical way to terminate a line?

Some possibilities are given on the following lines.

printStream.printf( "\n" );
printStream.printf( "%n" );
printStream.print(( char )0x000A );
printStream.print(( char )0x000D );
printStream.print(( char )0x000D ); printStream.print(( char )0x000A );
printStream.print(( char )0x0085 ); // 0x0085 is Unicode »NEL - next line«
printStream.print(( char )0x2028 ); // 0x2028 is Unicode »line separator«

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?=]

When writing into a Unicode text file, given that the Stream
encoding was set to »UTF-8«, what is the proper, best or
canonical way to terminate a line?

Some possibilities are given on the following lines.

printStream.printf( "\n" );
printStream.printf( "%n" );
printStream.print(( char )0x000A );
printStream.print(( char )0x000D );
printStream.print(( char )0x000D ); printStream.print(( char )0x000A );
printStream.print(( char )0x0085 ); // 0x0085 is Unicode »NEL - next line«
printStream.print(( char )0x2028 ); // 0x2028 is Unicode »line separator«

For a disk file in UTF-8 I can not really see any reason not to use
System.getProperty("line.separator").

Arne

 

[Thomas Fritsch]

When writing into a Unicode text file, given that the Stream
encoding was set to »UTF-8«, what is the proper, best or
canonical way to terminate a line?

Some possibilities are given on the following lines.

printStream.printf( "\n" );
printStream.printf( "%n" );
printStream.print(( char )0x000A );
printStream.print(( char )0x000D );
printStream.print(( char )0x000D ); printStream.print(( char )0x000A );
printStream.print(( char )0x0085 ); // 0x0085 is Unicode »NEL - next line«
printStream.print(( char )0x2028 ); // 0x2028 is Unicode »line separator«

Not to forget
printStream.println();

 

[Lew]

Not to forget
printStream.println();

Lest we forget:

All characters printed by a PrintStream are converted into bytes using the platform's default character encoding. The PrintWriter class should be used in situations that require writing characters rather than bytes.

Assuming that your variable "printStream" is of type "PrintStream", which you
did not aver.

I get a cringe seeing "the Stream encoding was set" - Java IO Streams don't
have encodings. The PrintStream methods use encodings, but the Stream doesn't.

To answer your question, printf()'s "%n" specifies "the platform-specific line
separator", but that has nothing to do with encodings.

 

[Roedy Green]

I get a cringe seeing "the Stream encoding was set" - Java IO Streams don't
have encodings. The PrintStream methods use encodings, but the Stream doesn't.

When you are playing with encodings you use a Reader/Writer.

see http://mindprod.com/applet/fileio.html
for sample code.

 

[Rob]

For a disk file in UTF-8 I can not really see any reason not to use
System.getProperty("line.separator").

Arne

If you're trying to get from a Java String to UTF-8 bytes, you could
try using String.getBytes("UTF-8"). The JDK will take care of
converting for you. If your Java String contains \n I'd expect it to
be converted to UTF-8 properly. Once you have the byte array you can
write the bytes directly to the file.

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?=]

If you're trying to get from a Java String to UTF-8 bytes, you could
try using String.getBytes("UTF-8"). The JDK will take care of
converting for you. If your Java String contains \n I'd expect it to
be converted to UTF-8 properly. Once you have the byte array you can
write the bytes directly to the file.

1) \n is line separator on Unix/Linux - it is not line seaprator
on all platforms.

2) \n (and \r) are the same in ASCII, ISO-8859-1, UTF-8 etc..

Arne