com.upokecenter.text

Interface ICharacterEncoder

public interface ICharacterEncoder

Defines a method that can be implemented by classes that convert Unicode code points to bytes.

Method Summary

Modifier and Type	Method and Description
int	Encode(int c, IWriter output) Converts a Unicode code point to bytes and writes the bytes to an output stream.

Method Detail

Encode

int Encode(int c,
           IWriter output)

Converts a Unicode code point to bytes and writes the bytes to an output stream.

If this method returns -2, indicating an error, the caller of this method can take one of a variety of actions to handle the error. For example, it can write an escape sequence using the code point (such as the HTML error mode in the Encoding Standard), it can replace the code point with a "best fit" to that code point (which can consist of one or more bytes) and write the "best fit" instead, it can replace the code point with an arbitrary byte or sequence of bytes, or it can throw an exception. In some cases, where the error won't cause data loss or a security problem, the caller can also ignore the encoding error.

Parameters:

c - Either a Unicode code point (from 0-0xd7ff or from 0xe000 to 0x10ffff), or the value -1 indicating the end of the stream.

output - Output stream where the converted bytes will be written. The decoder can maintain internal state, including data on code points already passed as input, so this parameter should not change when using the same character encoder object.

Returns:

The number of bytes written to the stream; -1 if no further code points remain (for example, if _c_ is -1 indicating the end of the stream), or -2 if an encoding error occurs. (Note that it's possible for this method to return 0 if, for example, it can't generate new bytes yet based on the current input.). If this method returns -2, it should not write any bytes to the output stream.