How do i use 32 bit unicode characters in C#?

Question

Maybe i dont need 32bit strings but i need to represent 32bit characters

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm Now i grabbed the symbola font and can see the character when i paste it (in the url or any text areas) so i know i have the font support for it.

But how do i support it in my C#/.NET app?

-edit- i'll add something. When i pasted the said character in my .NET winform app i DO NOT see the character correctly. When pasting it into firefox i do see it correctly. How do i see the characters correctly in my winform apps?

Answer 1

I am not sure I understand your question:

• Strings in .NET are UTF-16 encoded, and there is nothing you can do about this. If you want to get the UTF-32 version of a string, you will have to convert it into a byte array with the UTF32Encoding class.
• Characters in .NET are thus 16 bits long, and there is nothing you can do about this either. A UTF-32 encoded character can only be represented by a byte array (with 4 items). You can use the UTF32Encoding class for this purpose.
• Every UTF-32 character has an equivalent UTF-16 representation, and vice-versa. So in this context we could only speak of characters, and of their different representations (encodings), UTF-16 being the representation of choice on the .NET platform.

Answer 2

You didn't say what exactly do you mean by “support”. But there is nothing special you need to do to to work with characters that don't fit into one 16-bit char, unless you do string manipulation. They will just be represented as surrogate pairs, but you shouldn't need to know about that if you treat the string as a whole.

One exception is that some string manipulation methods won't work correctly. For example "\U0001F4A9".Substring(1) will return the second half of the surrogate pair, which is not a valid string.