Class UnicodeEscaper (2.0.0)

An Escaper that converts literal text into a format safe for inclusion in a particular context (such as an XML document). Typically (but not always), the inverse process of "unescaping" the text is performed automatically by the relevant parser.

For example, an XML escaper would convert the literal string "Foo<Bar>" into "Foo<Bar>" to prevent "<Bar>" from being confused with an XML tag. When the resulting XML document is parsed, the parser API will return this text as the original literal string "Foo<Bar>".

As there are important reasons, including potential security issues, to handle Unicode correctly if you are considering implementing a new escaper you should favor using UnicodeEscaper wherever possible.

A UnicodeEscaper instance is required to be stateless, and safe when used concurrently by multiple threads.

Several popular escapers are defined as constants in the class CharEscapers. To create your own escapers extend this class and implement the #escape(int) method.

Returns the Unicode code point of the character at the given index.

Unlike Character#codePointAt(CharSequence, int) or String#codePointAt(int) this method will never fail silently when encountering an invalid surrogate pair.

The behaviour of this method is as follows:

1. If index >= end, IndexOutOfBoundsException is thrown.
2. If the character at the specified index is not a surrogate, it is returned.
3. If the first character was a high surrogate value, then an attempt is made to read the next character.
   1. If the end of the sequence was reached, the negated value of the trailing high surrogate is returned.
   2. If the next character was a valid low surrogate, the code point value of the high/low surrogate pair is returned.
   3. If the next character was not a low surrogate value, then IllegalArgumentException is thrown.
4. If the first character was a low surrogate value, IllegalArgumentException is thrown.

Returns the escaped form of the given Unicode code point, or null if this code point does not need to be escaped. When called as part of an escaping operation, the given code point is guaranteed to be in the range 0 <= cp <= Character#MAX_CODE_POINT.

If an empty array is returned, this effectively strips the input character from the resulting text.

If the character does not need to be escaped, this method should return null, rather than an array containing the character representation of the code point. This enables the escaping algorithm to perform more efficiently.

If the implementation of this method cannot correctly handle a particular code point then it should either throw an appropriate runtime exception or return a suitable replacement character. It must never silently discard invalid input as this may constitute a security risk.

Returns the escaped form of a given literal string.

If you are escaping input in arbitrary successive chunks, then it is not generally safe to use this method. If an input string ends with an unmatched high surrogate character, then this method will throw IllegalArgumentException. You should ensure your input is valid UTF-16 before calling this method.

Returns the escaped form of a given literal string, starting at the given index. This method is called by the #escape(String) method when it discovers that escaping is required. It is protected to allow subclasses to override the fastpath escaping function to inline their escaping test.

This method is not reentrant and may only be invoked by the top level #escape(String) method.

Scans a sub-sequence of characters from a given CharSequence, returning the index of the next character that requires escaping.

Note: When implementing an escaper, it is a good idea to override this method for efficiency. The base class implementation determines successive Unicode code points and invokes #escape(int) for each of them. If the semantics of your escaper are such that code points in the supplementary range are either all escaped or all unescaped, this method can be implemented more efficiently using CharSequence#charAt(int).

Note however that if your escaper does not escape characters in the supplementary range, you should either continue to validate the correctness of any surrogate characters encountered or provide a clear warning to users that your escaper does not validate its input.

See PercentEscaper for an example.