RFR: JDK-8021560,(str) String constructors that take ByteBuffer

[Alan Bateman]

On 13/02/2018 06:24, Xueming Shen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Please help review the proposal to add following constructors and 
> methods in String
> class to take ByteBuffer as the input and output data buffer.
>
> public String(ByteBuffer bytes, Charset cs);
> public String(ByteBuffer bytes, String csname);
These constructors looks good (for the parameter names then I assume you 
meant "src" rather than "bytes" here).

> public int getBytes(byte[] dst, int offset, Charset cs);
> public int getBytes(byte[] dst, int offset, String csname);
> public int getBytes(ByteBuffer bytes, Charset cs);
> public int getBytes(ByteBuffer bytes, Charset csn);
These four methods encode as many characters as possible into the 
destination byte[] or buffer but don't give any indication that the 
destination didn't have enough space to encode the entire string. I thus 
worry they could be a hazard and result in buggy code. If there is 
insufficient space then the user of the API doesn't know how many 
characters were encoded so it's not easy to substring and call getBytes 
again to encode the remaining characters. There is also the issue of how 
to size the destination. What would you think about having them fail 
when there is insufficient space? If they do fail then there is a side 
effect that they will have written to the destination so that would need 
to be documented too.

-Alan