Java – Can we switch between ASCII and Unicode

asciijavaunicode

I came across "char variable is in Unicode format, but adopts / maps well to ASCII also". What is the need to mention that? Of course ASCII is 1 byte and Unicode is 2. And Unicodeitself contains ASCII code in it (by default – its the standard). So are there some languages in which a char variable supports UNICODE but not ASCII?

Also, the character format (Unicode/ASCII) is decided by the platform we use, right? (UNIX, Linux, Windows etc). So suppose my platform used ASCII, is it not possible to switch to Unicode or vice-versa?

Best Answer

Java uses Unicode internally. Always. Actually, it uses UTF-16 most of the time, but that's too much detail for now.

It can not use ASCII internally (for a String for example). You can represent any String that can be represented in ASCII in Unicode, so that should not be a problem.

The only place where the platform comes into play is when Java has to choose an encoding when you didn't specify one. For example, when you create a FileWriter to write String values to a String: at that point Java needs to use an encoding to specify how the specific character should be mapped to bytes. If you don't specify one, then the default encoding of the platform is used. That default encoding is almost never ASCII. Most Linux platforms use UTF-8, Windows often uses some ISO-8859-* derivatives (or other culture-specific 8-bit encodings), but no current OS uses ASCII (simply because ASCII can't represent a lot of important characters).

In fact, pure ASCII is almost irrelevant these days: no one uses it. ASCII is only important as a common subset of the mapping of most 8-bit encodings (including UTF-8): the lower 128 Unicode codepoints map 1:1 to the numeric values 0-127 in many, many encodings. But pure ASCII (where the values 128-255 are undefined) is no longer in active use.

As a side note, Java 9 has an internal optimization called "compact strings" where Strings that contain only characters representable in Latin-1 use a single byte per character instead of 2. This optimization is very useful for all kinds of "computer speak" like XML and similar protocols where the majority of the text is in the ASCII range. But it's also fully transparent to the developer, as all that handling is done internally in the String class and will not be visible from the outside.

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