Java Glossary : Reuters

Last updated 2004-06-28 by Roedy Green ©1996-2004 Canadian Mind Products

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Java Test for Unicode Standard Support

Last updated 2004-06-28 by Roedy Green ©2002-2004 Canadian Mind Products.

Java Test for Unicode^TM Standard Support

Reuters is an international company and is committed to delivering news and financial information in all major languages. The Unicode Standard is capable of representing all characters from all languages and its use can greatly improve multi-language program development. Java uses the Unicode Standard to represent all characters.

Test Applet

In the applet shown below (Java enabled browsers only) 256 characters are displayed in a grid. By clicking on the bottom and right 'sliders' the offset of this character window into the Unicode character set can be changed.





The applet was written by Nic Fulton in London.

Here is the Java source:
view

Explanation

The slider at the base represents the first of the four hex digits of a Unicode character. The right-hand slider represents the second digit. The grid of 256 cells should show the 256 characters whose Unicode code points start with those two hex digits, and the position in this grid makes up the third and fouth digits.

If you click on one of the characters, it will be displayed in the box in the bottom right hand corner. Its full hex value will be displayed above it.

The first 256 Unicode characters are based on ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1). Many browsers are only able to display, in Java applets, these 256 Unicode characters. To test whether your browser supports more than the Latin-1 characters, try moving the sliders away from zero and zero. For instance, the ideographic characters known in Japanese as Kanji, in Chinese as Hanzi and in Korean as Hanja, start at U+4E00 (the Unicode Standard uses the prefix "U+" to indicate a Unicode character). Place the bottom slider against "4", the right-hand slider against *quot;E" and you should see lots of Kanji characters.

Alternatively try setting the bottom slider to "0" and the right slider to "3". In this case some Greek characters should appear.

Does your browser support the Unicode Standard?

If you were able to see Greek (U+0370 onwards), Cyrillic (U+0400 onwards), Kanji (U+4E00 onwards) or other characters that were not in the first grid, then your browser does seem to support the Unicode Standard in Java.

If you were unable to see any other characters that were not in the first grid, then your browser does not seem to support the Unicode Standard in Java, but you may simply not have the necessary fonts.

However, if by moving the sliders nothing changed then it is likely that the Java Virtual Machine in your browser is chopping the top eight bits from each 16-bit Unicode character, leaving you with a Latin-1 character. This means that your browser does not support the Unicode Standard in Java.

Further Information

The Ninth International Unicode Conference will be held on September 4-6, 1996, in San Jose, California. The theme is Software Development + the Internet: Going Global with Unicode.

For more information on the Ninth International Unicode Conference and on The Unicode Standard, visit the Unicode web site.

Unicode is a trademark of Unicode, Inc.

Unicode

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