Codes below 32 were called unprintable and were used for cussing. Most computers in those days were using 8-bit bytes, so not only could you store every possible ASCII character, but you had a whole bit to spare, which, if you were wicked, you could use for your own devious purposes: the dim bulbs at WordStar actually turned on the high bit to indicate the last letter in a word, condemning WordStar to English text only. This could conveniently be stored in 7 bits. Space was 32, the letter “A” was 65, etc.
The only characters that mattered were good old unaccented English letters, and we had a code for them called ASCII which was able to represent every character using a number between 32 and 127. We don’t have to go that far back in time.īack in the semi-olden days, when Unix was being invented and K&R were writing The C Programming Language, everything was very simple. You probably think I’m going to talk about very old character sets like EBCDIC here. The easiest way to understand this stuff is to go chronologically.
And I should warn you that character handling is only a tiny portion of what it takes to create software that works internationally, but I can only write about one thing at a time so today it’s character sets. I’m really just trying to set a minimum bar here so that everyone can understand what’s going on and can write code that has a hope of working with text in any language other than the subset of English that doesn’t include words with accents. Please do not write another line of code until you finish reading this article.īefore I get started, I should warn you that if you are one of those rare people who knows about internationalization, you are going to find my entire discussion a little bit oversimplified. All that stuff about “plain text = ascii = characters are 8 bits” is not only wrong, it’s hopelessly wrong, and if you’re still programming that way, you’re not much better than a medical doctor who doesn’t believe in germs. In this article I’ll fill you in on exactly what every working programmer should know. So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don’t know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I’m going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. When I discovered that the popular web development tool PHP has almost complete ignorance of character encoding issues, blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near impossible to develop good international web applications, I thought, enough is enough. I corresponded with the developer of that package and he sort of thought they “couldn’t do anything about it.” Like many programmers, he just wished it would all blow over somehow.īut it won’t. When I looked into another commercial library, it, too, had a completely broken character code implementation. When I looked closely at the commercial ActiveX control we were using to parse MIME email messages, we discovered it was doing exactly the wrong thing with character sets, so we actually had to write heroic code to undo the wrong conversion it had done and redo it correctly. Japanese? They have email in Japanese? I had no idea. A couple of years ago, a beta tester for FogBUGZ was wondering whether it could handle incoming email in Japanese. I’ve been dismayed to discover just how many software developers aren’t really completely up to speed on the mysterious world of character sets, encodings, Unicode, all that stuff. See the example below.Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you’re supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be?ĭid you ever get an email from your friends in Bulgaria with the subject line “?”? It returns the value before the colon if the conditional expression is evaluated as true otherwise, it returns the value after. The second and third are the values before and after the colon.
The first is a conditional expression that returns a boolean value. The ternary operator consists of three segments. Use Question Mark and Colon Operator in Java else statement in Java and can be used as a single line statement for decision making. The question mark and colon operators are collectively called ternary operators in Java because they work on three operands.
This tutorial introduces how to use question mark and colon operator in Java and lists some example codes to understand the topic. Use Nested Question Mark and Colon Operator in Java.Use Question Mark and Colon Operator in Java.