Characters: Working with Non-English Languages

In the early days, back when the oceans covered the earth and email was just being defined by RFC 822, characters 7 bits long roamed the planet. Sure, they could only hold a hundred odd characters in those 7 bits, but that was enough for English. They prospered. Life was good. Eventually the characters swam across the Atlantic and realized, hey, there are people over here in Western Europe who don't speak English! The characters expanded to 8 bits, enough to add some accent marks and upside down punctuation. Life was again good. Now the brave characters have ventured still farther out and discovered there's a whole world out there – full of rich languages and history – and they've tried to absorb it all. They've swelled to 16 bits and even 32 bits sometimes.

This talk explains the life of characters: How they differ from bytes, why they gather in code pages, how you read and write them, how Java actually stores them internally, how XML makes use of them, how HTTP handles them, how to shift them, how to search across them, and how to sort them.

If you've ever seen boxes on your screen where words should be or wondered why editing your XML file makes the computer beep, this talk is for you. If you need a business reason to come, well, wouldn't it be nice to really understand the implications when the Properties.load() Javadocs say, “The stream is assumed to be using the ISO 8859-1 character encoding”?

About Jason Hunter

Jason Hunter is Principal Technologist with Mark Logic, specializing in large-scale XML content manipulation using XQuery. He's probably best known as the author of “Java Servlet Programming” (O'Reilly Media). He's also an Apache Member and as Apache's representative on the Java Community Process Executive Committee he established a landmark agreement allowing open source Java. He's publisher of Servlets.com and XQuery.com, an original contributer to Apache Tomcat (and Apache Ant committer), the creator of the JDOM open source project, a member of the expert groups responsible for Servlet, JSP, JAXP, and XQJ API development, and was recently appointed Sun Java Champion. In 2003, he received the Oracle Magazine Author of the Year award, and in both 2005 and 2006, the JavaOne Outstanding Talk award. His largest audience was 15,000 at a JavaOne conference keynote.

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