I need to read and write `.properties` files in ISO-8859-1. Does Native offer something related to t...

# kotlin-native

[Edoardo Luppi]

I need to read and write .properties files in ISO-8859-1.
Does Native offer something related to this charset or am I on my own?

[ephemient]

it doesn't at this time. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-53318

[ephemient]

you'll need to use platform-specific facilities or write your own

[Edoardo Luppi]

Thanks! Yeah I was experimenting, see the other posts.

[Edoardo Luppi]

@ephemient btw, does K/N encode string in UTF-16 or UTF-8 by default?

[Edoardo Luppi]

There are contradicting information around.
Docs suggest UTF-8, this post suggests UTF-16.

[ephemient]

I can see how it's confusing, but it's not really

[ephemient]

conceptually String is a read-only wrapper around CharArray, for Java compatibility. a Char is a UTF-16 unit.

[ephemient]

Kotlin/Native always uses UTF-8 when converting between kotlin.String and anything outside Kotlin, such as .toKString() or .encodeToByteArray()

[Edoardo Luppi]

So basically the backing array is always UTF-16 units, which are then converted transparently to UTF-8 for any kind of C-interop.

[ephemient]

hypothetically that doesn't need to be the case; for example, on JVM String has a specialization for Latin-1 only strings. but it should not have any behavior noticeably different than that, yes

[Edoardo Luppi]

I guess for the ones working with Windows APIs the fact a string is represented as UTF-16 is an advantage.
And btw, now I can see what you're saying:

public val String.cstr: CValues<ByteVar>
    get() = if (isEmpty()) EmptyCString else CString(encodeToUtf8(this))

public val String.wcstr: CValues<UShortVar>
    get() = U16CString(this.toCharArray())

Only the cstr performs a conversion.

And on the runtime the string is identified as UTF-16

const KChar* utf16 = CharArrayAddressOfElementAt(thiz, start);