Hi friends! I have a test that checks whether a `....

# codereview

[Paulo Cereda]

Hi friends! I have a test that checks whether a .properties file correctly loads entries as UTF-8 — once the reader is using the correct charset, Properties works as expected. Consider this excerpt:

val expected = mapOf(
    "italian" to "anatra",
    "russian" to "утка",
    "chinese" to "鸭子",
    "japanese" to "アヒル",
    "korean" to "오리",
    "arabic" to "بطه",
    "hindi" to "बत्तख",
    ...
)

I was wondering if I should hardcode these strings into the Kotlin file, specially that I have RTL ones in there. Is this okay or there is a better way? Any suggestions are welcome! Thanks!

[ephemient]

there's no good way to write non-BMP characters (most of CJK, emoji, etc.) by character code in Kotlin currently https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-36872/Unicode-code-point-literals

[ephemient]

for now, if it's all readable characters (no LTR/RTL markers, ZWJ or other control or special space chars), IMO the best choice is to just write them directly in the Kotlin source file (which is interpreted as UTF-8). you may get warnings in your IDE or editor due to the use of mixed directionality but that's just how it is

[Paulo Cereda]

Thanks so much, @ephemient! Will do that. 😉

[loke]

You can always encode them as surrogate pairs using "\uXXXX" syntax. That's what I do.

[loke]

Here's an example: https://codeberg.org/loke/array/src/branch/master/array/src/commonTest/kotlin/com/dhsdevelopments/kap/CharTypesTest.kt#L27

[ephemient]

you can but it's less clear than if it were possible to \u{XXXXX} and IMO it's less clear than having the literal character there because the surrogate representation isn't how we think of the character in any other situation