String Index Error (Julia) - string

I'm a Julia newbie. When I was testing out the language, I got this error.
First of all, I'm defining String b to "he§y".
Julia seems behaving strangely when I have "special" characters in a String...
When I'm trying to get the third character of b (it's supposed to be '§'), everything is OK
However when I'm trying to get the fourth character of b (it's supposed to be 'y'), a "StringIndexError" is thrown.

I don't believe the compiler could throw you the error. Do you mean a runtime error?
I know nothing about Julian language but the symptoms seems to be related to indexing of string is not based on code point, but to some encoding.
The document from Julia lang seems supporting my hypothesis:
https://docs.julialang.org/en/stable/manual/strings/
The built-in concrete type used for strings (and string literals) in Julia is String. This supports the full range of Unicode characters via the UTF-8 encoding. (A transcode function is provided to convert to/from other Unicode encodings.)
...
Conceptually, a string is a partial function from indices to characters: for some index values, no character value is returned, and instead an exception is thrown. This allows for efficient indexing into strings by the byte index of an encoded representation rather than by a character index, which cannot be implemented both efficiently and simply for variable-width encodings of Unicode strings.
Edit: Quoted from Julia document, which is an example demonstrating exact "problem" you are facing.
julia> s = "\u2200 x \u2203 y"
"∀ x ∃ y"
Whether these Unicode characters are displayed as escapes or shown as
special characters depends on your terminal's locale settings and its
support for Unicode. String literals are encoded using the UTF-8
encoding. UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, meaning that not all
characters are encoded in the same number of bytes. In UTF-8, ASCII
characters – i.e. those with code points less than 0x80 (128) – are
encoded as they are in ASCII, using a single byte, while code points
0x80 and above are encoded using multiple bytes – up to four per
character. This means that not every byte index into a UTF-8 string is
necessarily a valid index for a character. If you index into a string
at such an invalid byte index, an error is thrown:
julia> s[1]
'∀': Unicode U+2200 (category Sm: Symbol, math)
julia> s[2]
ERROR: StringIndexError("∀ x ∃ y", 2)
[...]
julia> s[3]
ERROR: StringIndexError("∀ x ∃ y", 3)
Stacktrace:
[...]
julia> s[4]
' ': ASCII/Unicode U+0020 (category Zs: Separator, space)

Related

Why the string in unicode form is not equal to its unicode code point value?

We can get the string 你's unicode code point value:
u'你'.encode('unicode-escape')
b'\\u4f60'
Why the string in unicode form is not equal to its unicode code point value?
u'你' == u'\x4f\x60'
False
u'你' == u'\\u4f60'
False
It is, but your comparison strings are not correct to compare. The first one is two separate characters of a single byte, and the second one has the backslash escaped, meaning that it is the literal 6 characters \u4f60.
u'你' == u"\u4f60"
True
The encoded byte string has the two backslashes since the encoding escapes it, making it not equivalent even if turned back into a string unless you decode it with unicode-escape as well.
Side note, the u is default in python 3.

can not decoed using utf-8 after encoding with utf-8

In a situation I had to store data as utf-8 and now when I want to fetch and decode('utf-8') data it's just simply does not work. Consider line below as an example:
\x0d\x0a\xd8\xb3\xd8\xa7\xd9\x82\xdb\x8c\xe2\x80\x8c\xd9\x86\xd8\xa7\xd9\x85\xd9\x87
You can simply copy the line below to convert the string above to the human readable format:
b"\x0d\x0a\xd8\xb3\xd8\xa7\xd9\x82\xdb\x8c\xe2\x80\x8c\xd9\x86\xd8\xa7\xd9\x85\xd9\x87".decode("utf-8")
However could not find a way to convert the string to bytestring without corrupting the string. I tried following methods but all of them failed:
.decode("utf-8")
.decode()
.bytes()
Up until this point I could not find solution in OS or other places. Appreciate any help.
x0d\x0a\xd8\xb3\xd8\xa7\xd9\x82\xdb\x8c\xe2\x80\x8c\xd9\x86\xd8\xa7\xd9\x85\xd9\x87
b'x0d\x0a\xd8\xb3\xd8\xa7\xd9\x82\xdb\x8c\xe2\x80\x8c\xd9\x86\xd8\xa7\xd9\x85\xd9\x87'
The above lines (both given in the question) are particular instances of String and Bytes literals (respectively):
\xhh Character with hex value hh (2, 3)
2 Unlike in Standard C, exactly two hex digits are
required.
3 In a bytes literal, hexadecimal and octal escapes denote
the byte with the given value. In a string literal, these escapes
denote a Unicode character with the given value.
Let's check the string defined in such a way (inside Python prompt):
>>> xstr = "\x0d\x0a\xd8\xb3\xd8\xa7\xd9\x82\xdb\x8c\xe2\x80\x8c\xd9\x86\xd8\xa7\xd9\x85\xd9\x87"
>>> xstr
'\r\nساÙ\x82Û\x8câ\x80\x8cÙ\x86اÙ\x85Ù\x87'
>>> print( xstr)
ساÙÛâÙاÙ
Ù
>>>
Apparently, the print( xstr) output does not resemble a word in any known language however all its characters belong (by definition) to Unicode range r'[\u0000-\u00ff]' i.e. the first 256 of characters in Unicode, and voila - it's iso-8859-1 aka 'latin1'.
We need to get an encoded version of the xstr string as a bytes object, e.g. using str.encode method or built-in bytes() function. Then
print( bytes(xstr,'latin1').decode()); print(xstr.encode("latin1").decode())
ساقی‌نامه
ساقی‌نامه

How to get single backslash instead of double backslash with encode("unicode-escape")?

Get unicode point of character Ä.
Python3 version.
>>> str="Ä"
>>> str.encode("unicode-escape")
b'\\xc4'
How to get the single backslash format b'\xc4' instead of b'\\xc4' as my output ?
It's not entirely clear to me what you want, so I'll give you a few options.
Get the (Unicode) code point of a character as an integer:
>>> ord('Ä')
196
Display the integer in hex notation:
>>> hex(ord('Ä'))
'0xc4'
or with string formatting:
>>> '{:X}'.format(ord('Ä'))
'C4'
However, you talk about backslashes and show the bytestring b'\xc4'.
This is the Latin-1 encoding of 'Ä' (all characters with a Unicode codepoint below 256 can be encoded with Latin-1, and their byte value equals the Unicode codepoint).
>>> 'Ä'.encode('latin-1')
b'\xc4'
This is a bytestring of length 1.
It is displayed in a way in which you could type this character, ie. using an escape sequence with backslash-x and a two-digit hex number.
The "unicode-escape" codec produces these four ASCII characters (\, x, c 4), but not as str, but as a bytes object (because str.encode() returns bytes by definition).
To get a backslash in a str/bytes literal, you need to type two backslashes, so the representation form also uses two backslashes:
>>> 'Ä'.encode('unicode-escape')
b'\\xc4'
The "unicode-escape" codec is very Python-specific and I don't see a lot of applications; maybe if you want to write your own pickle protocol or parse fragments of Python source code.

How to convert string like "//u****" to text?

I want to convert a string like "//u****" to text (unicode) in Haskell.
I have a Java propertyes file, and it has the following content:
i18n.test.key=\u0050\u0069\u006e\u0067\u0020\uc190\uc2e4\ub960\u0020\ud50c\ub7ec\uadf8\uc778
I wanna convert it to text (Unicode) in Haskell.
I think I can do it like this:
Convert "\u****" to word8 array
Convert word8 array to ByteString
Use Text.Encoding.decodeUtf8 convert ByteString to text
But step 1 is little complicated for me.
How to do it in Haskell?
A simple solution may look like this:
decodeJava = T.decodeUtf16BE . BS.concat . gobble
gobble [] = []
gobble ('\\':'u':a:b:c:d:rest) = let sym = convert16 [a,b] [c,d]
in sym : gobble rest
gobble _ = error "decoding error"
convert16 hi lo = BS.pack [read $ "0x"++hi, read $ "0x"++lo]
Notes:
Your string is UTF16-encoded, therefore you need decodeUtf16BE.
Decoding will fail if there are other characters in the string. This code will work with your example only if you remove the trailing i.
Constructing the words by appending 0x and, in particular, using read is very slow, but will do the trick for small data.
If you replace \u with \x then this is a valid Haskell string literal.
my_string = "\x0050\x0069\x006e..."
You can then convert to Text if you want, or leave it as String, or whatever.
Watch out, Java normally uses UTF-16 to encode its strings, so interpreting the bytes as UTF-8 will probably not work.
If the codes in your file are UTF-16, you need to do the following:
find the numeric value (Unicode code point) for each quadrupel
check if this is a high surrogate character. If this is so, the following character will be a low surrogate character. The pair of surrogate characters can be mapped to a Unicode point.
make a String from your list of unicode numbers with map fromEnum
The following is a quote from the Java doc http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/ :
The char data type (and therefore the value that a Character object encapsulates) are based on the original Unicode specification, which defined characters as fixed-width 16-bit entities. The Unicode Standard has since been changed to allow for characters whose representation requires more than 16 bits. The range of legal code points is now U+0000 to U+10FFFF, known as Unicode scalar value. (Refer to the definition of the U+n notation in the Unicode Standard.)
The set of characters from U+0000 to U+FFFF is sometimes referred to as the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). Characters whose code points are greater than U+FFFF are called supplementary characters. The Java platform uses the UTF-16 representation in char arrays and in the String and StringBuffer classes. In this representation, supplementary characters are represented as a pair of char values, the first from the high-surrogates range, (\uD800-\uDBFF), the second from the low-surrogates range (\uDC00-\uDFFF).
Java has methods to combine a high surrogate character and a low surrogate character to get the Unicode point. You may want to check the source of the java.lang.Character class to find out how exactly they do this, but I guess it is some simple bit-operation.
Another possibility would be to check for a Haskell library that does UTF-16 decoding.

Perl's default string encoding and representation

In the following:
my $string = "Can you \x{FB01}nd my r\x{E9}sum\x{E9}?\n";
The x{FB01} and x{E9} are code points. And code points are encoded via an encoding scheme to a series of octets.
So the character è which has the codepoint \x{FB01} is part of the string of $string. But how does this work? Are all the characters in this sentence (including the ASCII ones) encoded via UTF-8?
If yes why do I get the following behavior?
my $str = "Some arbitrary string\n";
if(Encode::is_utf8($str)) {
print "YES str IS UTF8!\n";
}
else {
print "NO str IT IS NOT UTF8\n";
}
This prints "NO str IT IS NOT UTF8\n"
Additionally Encode::is_utf8($string) returns true.
In what way are $string and $str different and one is considered UTF-8 and the other not?
And in any case what is the encoding of $str? ASCII? Is this the default for Perl?
In C, a string is a collection of octets, but Perl has two string storage formats:
String of 8-bit values.
String of 72-bit values. (In practice, limited to 32-bit or 64-bit.)
As such, you don't need to encode code points to store them in a string.
my $s = "\x{2660}\x{2661}";
say length $s; # 2
say sprintf '%X', ord substr($s, 0, 1); # 2660
say sprintf '%X', ord substr($s, 1, 1); # 2661
(Internally, an extension of UTF-8 called "utf8" is used to store the strings of 72-bit chars. That's not something you should ever have to know except to realize the performance implications, but there are bugs that expose this fact.)
Encode's is_utf8 reports which type of string a scalar contains. It's a function that serves absolutely no use except to debug the bugs I previously mentioned.
An 8-bit string can store the value of "abc" (or the string in the OP's $str), so Perl used the more efficient 8-bit (UTF8=0) string format.
An 8-bit string can't store the value of "\x{2660}\x{2661}" (or the string in the OP's $string), so Perl used the 72-bit (UTF8=1) string format.
Zero is zero whether it's stored in a floating point number, a signed integer or an unsigned integer. Similarly, the storage format of strings conveys no information about the value of the string.
You can store code points in an 8-bit string (if they're small enough) just as easily as a 72-bit string.
You can store bytes in a 72-bit string just as easily as an 8-bit string.
In fact, Perl will switch between the two formats at will. For example, if you concatenate $string with $str, you'll get a string in the 72-bit format.
You can alter the storage format of a string with the builtins utf8::downgrade and utf8::upgrade, should you ever need to work around a bug.
utf8::downgrade($s); # Switch to strings of 8-bit values (UTF8=0).
utf8::upgrade($s); # Switch to strings of 72-bit values (UTF8=1).
You can see the effect using Devel::Peek.
>perl -MDevel::Peek -e"$s=chr(0x80); utf8::downgrade($s); Dump($s);"
SV = PV(0x7b8a74) at 0x4a84c4
REFCNT = 1
FLAGS = (POK,pPOK)
PV = 0x7bab9c "\200"\0
CUR = 1
LEN = 12
>perl -MDevel::Peek -e"$s=chr(0x80); utf8::upgrade($s); Dump($s);"
SV = PV(0x558a6c) at 0x1cc843c
REFCNT = 1
FLAGS = (POK,pPOK,UTF8)
PV = 0x55ab94 "\302\200"\0 [UTF8 "\x{80}"]
CUR = 2
LEN = 12
The \x{FB01} and \x{E9} are code points.
Not quiet, the numeric values inside the braces are codepoints. The whole \x expression is just a notation for a character. There are several notations for characters, most of them starting with a backslash, but the common one is the simple string literal. You might as well write:
use utf8;
my $string = "Can you find my résumé?\n";
# ↑ ↑ ↑
And code points are encoded via an encoding scheme to a series of octets.
True, but so far your string is a string of characters, not a buffer of octets.
But how does this work?
Strings consist of characters. That's just Perl's model. You as a programmer are supposed to deal with it at this level.
Of course, the computer can't, and the internal data structure must have some form of internal encoding. Far too much confusion ensues because "Perl can't keep a secret", the details leak out occasionally.
Are all the characters in this sentence (including the ASCII ones) encoded via UTF-8?
No, the internal encoding is lax UTF8 (no dash). It does not have some of the restrictions that UTF-8 (a.k.a. UTF-8-strict) has.
UTF-8 goes up to 0x10_ffff, UTF8 goes up to 0xffff_ffff_ffff_ffff on my 64-bit system. Codepoints greater than 0xffff_ffff will emit a non-portability warning, though.
In UTF-8 certain codepoints are non-characters or illegal characters. In UTF8, anything goes.
Encode::is_utf8
… is an internals function, and is clearly marked as such. You as a programmer are not supposed to peek. But since you want to peek, no one can stop you. Devel::Peek::Dump is a better tool for getting at the internals.
Read http://p3rl.org/UNI for an introduction to the topic of encoding in Perl.
is_utf8 is a badly-named function that doesn't mean what you think it means or have anything to do with that. The answer to your question is that $string doesn't have an encoding, because it's not encoded. When you call Encode::encode with some encoding, the result of that will be a string that is encoded, and has a known encoding

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