ByteBuffer to CharBuffer

[Brian Burkhalter]

Looping in nio-dev which, as Pavel noted, is the apt forum for this topic.

Jonas’s response is correct. The concept of “view buffer” is specified by [1]. In particular the statement

"A view buffer is simply another buffer whose content is backed by the byte buffer."

at least to my interpretation signifies that the content of the view buffer is conceptually mapped bit-by-bit to / from the corresponding bits in the byte buffer. The details are of course subject to byte order and the like, and the interpretation of the bits for floating point values is according to IEEE 754. There is however no encoding or decoding applied.

- Brian

[1] http://download.java.net/java/jdk9/docs/api/java/nio/ByteBuffer.html#views

On Feb 6, 2017, at 5:35 AM, Jonas Konrad <me at yawk.at> wrote:

> From what I can tell, asCharBuffer behaves exactly like the other as*Buffer methods, meaning every char in the CharBuffer is represented by two bytes in the original ByteBuffer (big- or little-endian depending on ByteOrder of the ByteBuffer). This means bb.asCharBuffer().get() behaves like bb.getChar(). asCharBuffer does *not* decode using any Charset (not the platform charset either), it just interprets the bytes as 16-bit unsigned integers which happen to be the char type in java. I guess this technically counts as UTF-16? It doesn't do validity checks either, though.
> 
> If you wish to decode a ByteBuffer, you can use the CharsetDecoder API directly. I do not believe an asCharBuffer-like method which decodes on the fly is possible generally for all charsets, because decoding is not necessarily possible in a random-access buffer due to dynamic-width encoding.
> 
> - Jonas Konrad
> 
> On 02/06/2017 11:57 AM, Jay wrote:
>> java.nio.ByteBuffer provides a method asCharBuffer() which returns a
>> "view" of the ByteBuffer as a character buffer. It however does not
>> take any arguments. And there is no mention in the Javadocs as to how
>> it converts from bytes to chars.
>> 
>> 1. There should be a method ByteBuffer.asCharBuffer(CharSet) and/or
>> ByteBuffer.asCharBuffer(String charSet) which allows the user to
>> explicitly specify the character set to be used for conversion.
>> 
>> 2. The method ByteBuffer.asCharBuffer() should mention that this
>> method uses the platform default charset for bytes-to-chars
>> conversion.
>> 
>> I can provide a patch with these two changes. What do you guys think?
>> 

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