Character Set

Character set is a map of characters and numbers(ascii code, code point).

ASCII

• American Standard Code for Information Interchange
• Map Latin characters to ASCII code (eg: A->0x41, a-> 0x61)
• 0 - 31 and 127 are Device Control Characters
• 32 - 126 are Printable Characters
• 0x00 - 0x7F

ASCII Table.png

GB

GB2312 -> GBK -> GB18030

Unicode

• Map ALL characters in ALL languages to a unique number(a code point)
• 0x0000-0x10FFFF
• 17 Planes, 65536 code points in each plane
• Sample Chinese characters in BMP 0x4E00-0x9FBF

Sample Chinese characters in BMP (0x4E00-0x9FBF)

Character Encoding

Character set translate characters to numbers, character encoding translate numbers into binary.

UTF-8

• Unicode Transformation Format 8 bits
• Variable width(1-4 bytes) character encoding
• Backward compatible with ASCII
• Chinese characters (0x0800-0xFFFF) are encoded to 3 bytes

UTF-16

• Unicode Transformation Format 16 bits
• Variable width(2 or 4 bytes) character encoding
• Characters in BMP are encoded to 2 bytes
• Characters in Plane1-16 are encoded to 4 bytes
• Byte Order Mark(BOM)
  • 0xFEFF big-ending BE
  • 0xFFFE little-ending LE

UTF-32

• Unicode Transformation Format 32 bits
• Fixed width(4 bytes) character encoding

Practise in Java

import java.nio.ByteBuffer;
import java.nio.charset.Charset;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

public class CharacterTest {
    private static final Charset UTF8 = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
    private static final Charset UTF16_BE = Charset.forName("UTF-16BE");
    private static final Charset UTF32 = Charset.forName("UTF-32");
    private static final List<Charset> charsets = new ArrayList();

    static {
        charsets.add(UTF8);
        charsets.add(UTF16_BE);
        charsets.add(UTF32);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        printCharacter("A");
        printCharacter("¼");
        printCharacter("一");
        printCharacter("𠀡");
    }

    /**
     * Print Code Points of str
     * Print str encoded by utf-8,utf-16,utf-32
     *
     * @param str
     */
    private static void printCharacter(String str) {
        str.codePoints().forEach((s) ->
                System.out.format("%10s%40s\n", "Code Point", "0x " + Integer.toHexString(s).toUpperCase() + " "));

        charsets.forEach((charset -> {
            ByteBuffer byteBuffer = charset.encode(str);
            System.out.format("%10s%40s\n", charset.name(), byteBufferToHexString(byteBuffer));
            System.out.format("%10s%40s\n", charset.name(), byteBufferToBinaryString(byteBuffer));

        }));
        System.out.println();
    }

    /**
     * ByteBuffer to hexadecimal string
     *
     * @param byteBuffer
     * @return
     */
    private static String byteBufferToHexString(ByteBuffer byteBuffer) {
        StringBuilder hexString = new StringBuilder("0x ");
        byteBuffer.rewind();

        while (byteBuffer.hasRemaining()) {
            int i = Byte.toUnsignedInt(byteBuffer.get());
            hexString.append(padZeros(Integer.toHexString(i), 2));
        }
        return hexString.toString();
    }


    /**
     * ByteBuffer to binary string
     *
     * @param byteBuffer
     * @return
     */
    private static String byteBufferToBinaryString(ByteBuffer byteBuffer) {
        StringBuilder binaryString = new StringBuilder("0b ");
        byteBuffer.rewind();

        while (byteBuffer.hasRemaining()) {
            int i = Byte.toUnsignedInt(byteBuffer.get());
            binaryString.append(padZeros(Integer.toBinaryString(i), 8));
        }
        return binaryString.toString();
    }

    /**
     * Pad len-str 0(s) to the left of str.
     *
     * @param str
     * @param len
     * @return
     */
    private static String padZeros(String str, int len) {
        int numOfZeros = len - str.length();
        StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
        for (int i = 0; i < numOfZeros; i++) {
            stringBuilder.append("0");
        }
        stringBuilder.append(str.toUpperCase()).append(" ");
        return stringBuilder.toString();
    }
}

Character encoded in UTF-8/16/32

Reference

Unicode Wiki
Unicode code points
Unicode lookup
SOF - Unicode UTF-8 UTF-16
cnblogs - Unicode UTF-8 UTF-16