relying on default charset to be consistent across instances

[processing-bot]

Created by: ratchetfreak

https://github.com/processing/processing/blob/a6a86250ffa4041b7d77fbb66dc02e78360c64f0/java/libraries/net/src/processing/net/Client.java#L718-L720

java.lang.String.getBytes() relies on the default charset which is not necessarily consistent between instances. This should be fixed to a portable standard charset

  public String readString() {
    byte b[] = readBytes();
    if (b == null) return null;
    return new String(b, StandardCharset.UTF_8); // or whatever charset you want to fix it to
  }

  public void write(String data) {
    write(data.getBytes(StandardCharset.UTF_8)); // must match readString
  }

[processing-bot]

Created by: benfry

Hm, this is noted in the code:

  /**
   * <h3>Advanced</h3>
   * Write a String to the output. Note that this doesn't account
   * for Unicode (two bytes per char), nor will it send UTF8
   * characters.. It assumes that you mean to send a byte buffer
   * (most often the case for networking and serial i/o) and
   * will only use the bottom 8 bits of each char in the string.
   * (Meaning that internally it uses String.getBytes)
   *
   * If you want to move Unicode data, you can first convert the
   * String to a byte stream in the representation of your choice
   * (i.e. UTF8 or two-byte Unicode data), and send it as a byte array.
   */

and also applies to readString(). Though that was a decision made ~20 years ago and UTF-8 is waaaay more prominent now. And it does seem like consistent behavior is better than undefined behavior.

I'll sleep on it, but it seems like a good idea to change.

[processing-bot]

Created by: dzaima

Note that Java 18 defaults to UTF-8, so it's not that far away from when this won't be a problem anymore, and gives a good reason to change things in the meantime.

[processing-bot]

Created by: benfry

Good point, will go with that.

[processing-bot]

Created by: benfry

Changed for 4.0 beta 3 with aab8d8f

[processing-bot]

Created by: github-actions[bot]

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