Deborah Goldsmith wrote:
UTF-16 is the native encoding used for Cocoa, Java, ICU, and Carbon, and is what appears in the APIs for all of them. UTF-16 is also what's stored in the volume catalog on Mac disks. UTF-8 is only used in BSD APIs for backward compatibility. It's also used in plain text files (or XML or HTML), again for compatibility.
Deborah
On OS X, Cocoa and Carbon use Core Foundation, whose API does not have a one-true-encoding internally. Follow the rather long URL for details: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/CoreFoundation/Conceptual/CFStrings... I would vote for an API that not just hides the internal store, but allows different internal stores to be used in a mostly compatible way. However, There is a UniChar typedef on OS X which is the same unsigned 16 bit integer as Java's JNI would use. -- Chris