Understanding character encoding in typical Java web app

Posted by Marcus on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Marcus
Published on 2010-03-28T20:19:13Z Indexed on 2010/03/28 20:23 UTC
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Filed under:

character-encoding

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unicode

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Oracle

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java

Some pseudocode from a typical web app:

String a = "A bunch of text"; //UTF-16
saveTextInDb(a); //Write to Oracle VARCHAR(15) column
String b = readTextFromDb(); //UTF-16
out.write(b); //Write to http response

In the first line we create a Java String which uses UTF-16.

When you save to Oracle VARCHAR(15) does Oracle also store this as UTF-16? Does the length of an Oracle VARCHAR refer to number of Unicode characters (and not number of bytes)?

And then when we write b to the ServletResponse is this being written as UTF-16 or are we by default converting to another encoding like UTF-8?

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