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I'm converting a WinForms app to Silverlight (VB.NET). What should I use instead of Char.ConvertFromUtf32 as it's not available to use in Silverlight?

Alex
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2 Answers2

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UTF-32 is currently not part of Silverlight, so you have to find a way around the limitation. I think you should stop a moment and think exactly why you need to read UTF32-encoded text.

  • If you are reading such text from a database or a file on the server, I would perform the conversion server-side (if possible I would convert everything to UTF-8 and get rid of the UTF-32 data in one shot).

  • If you are parsing a user-provided file on the client side, I would detect the UTF-32 encoding and gently tell the user that the file encoding is not supported. UTF32 is pretty rare nowadays, so I guess it should not be a very common case (but I could be wrong not knowing your exact situation).

In order to detect the file encoding you have to look at the first few bytes (byte order mark) -more information here, if they are not present the task becomes much harder and involves some kind of heuristics based on character frequency.

Francesco De Vittori
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  • Parsing a JSON is common and you can't ask anyone to change `\u0000` or `\u001F` to another representation, as it is unique in JSON. – Cœur Aug 31 '14 at 21:00
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From: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/types/how-to-convert-between-hexadecimal-strings-and-numeric-types

You can use a direct cast, like:

// Get the character corresponding to the integral value.
string stringValue = Char.ConvertFromUtf32(value);
char charValue = (char)value;

Small warning, it will only work up to 0xffff. It will not work for high range Unicode from 0x10000 to 0x10ffff.

Also, if you need to parse \uXXXX, try this other question: How do I convert Unicode escape sequences to Unicode characters in a .NET string?

Cœur
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