In Java, String.length() is to return the number of characters in the string, while String.getBytes().length is to return the number of bytes to represent the string with the specified encoding. By default, the encoding will be the value of system property file.encoding, the encoding name can be set manually as well by calling System.setProperty("file.encoding", "XXX"). For example, UTF-8, Cp1252. In many cases, String.length() will return the same value as String.getBytes().length, but in some cases it's not the same.String.length() is the number of UTF-16 code units needed to represent the s...

When we are coding we may often see some encoding specifications in our source codes such as UTF-8,GB2312. Do you know what these encoding mean and why we need them? In this post, Julián Solórzano will introduce the most widely used encoding specification around the world accomodating all different character sets in the world.UTF-8 is a method for encoding Unicode characters using 8-bit sequences. Unicode is a standard for representing a great variety of characters from many languages.Something like 40 years ago, the standard for information encoding ASCII was created. ASCII...

Computers store every piece of text using a “character encoding,” which gives a number to each character. For example, the byte 61 stands for ‘a’ and 62 stands for ‘b’ in the ASCII encoding, which was launched in 1963. Before the web, computer systems were siloed, and there were hundreds of different encodings. Depending on the encoding, C1 could mean any of ¡, Ё, Ą, Ħ, ‘, ”, or parts of thousands of characters, from æ to 品. If you brought a file from one computer to another, it could come out as gobbledygook.Unicode was...