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<p>I see. So, in the protobuf case you would need to:</p>
<p>1. encode the Java string in the desired charset<br>
2. find out how many bytes you have<br>
3. write the length computed in (2) and the string bytes in (1)
into the resulting segment</p>
<p>It seems to me that in this case encoding and length travels
together? E.g. you need to encode anyway, at which point you also
know the byte size?</p>
<p>(I'm a bit unsure that here there's anything to be gained by the
method you proposed?)</p>
<p>Do you have use cases where you don't want to decode, you just
want to know the byte length?</p>
<p>Maurizio</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 11/11/2025 14:35, Liam Miller-Cushon
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:CAL4Qsgu2GRug1Q_YhtNKfPUWWUd6gHCQNx+sN+_AaSdZsfD9Wg@mail.gmail.com">
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="ltr">On Tue, Nov 11, 2025 at 3:10 PM Maurizio
Cimadamore <<a href="mailto:maurizio.cimadamore@oracle.com" moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">maurizio.cimadamore@oracle.com</a>>
wrote:</div>
<div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Going
back to this... do you have a use case where you would like
to <br>
know the byte length of a string encoded in a given charset?<br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
The main use-case is to know if a preexisting buffer is big
enough to write out an encoded string to.</div>
<div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container">As well, for the
protobuf example, it's writing a varint length as a prefix
before the string data, so it needs to know what the encoded
length is to know how many bytes to reserve to encode the
length itself.</div>
<div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container">(I'm happy to
separate out the discussion of string.getBytesLength(Charset),
or not, if you think it could safely be pursued separately
without risk of dead ends. I mentioned it here because the
use-case is at least somewhat related, and in case you saw
connections I'd missed.)</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
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