Java modified UTF-8 strings in Python

Question

I am interfacing with a Java application via Python. I need to be able to construct byte sequences which contain UTF-8 strings. Java uses a modified UTF-8 encoding in DataInputStream.readUTF() which is not supported by Python (yet at least)

Can anybody point me in the right direction to construct Java modified UTF-8 strings in Python?

Update #1: To see a little more about the Java modified UTF-8, check out the readUTF() method from the DataInput interface on line 550 here, or here in the Java SE docs.

Update #2: I am trying to interface with a third-party JBoss web app which is using this modified UTF-8 format to read in strings via POST requests by calling DataInputStream.readUTF() (sorry for any confusion regarding normal Java UTF-8 string operation).

Answer 1

You can ignore Modified UTF-8 Encoding (MUTF-8) and just treat it as UTF-8. On the Python side, you can just handle it like this,

1. Convert the string into normal UTF-8 and stores bytes in a buffer.
2. Write the 2-byte buffer length (not the string length) as binary in big-endian.
3. Write the whole buffer.

I've done this in PHP and Java didn't complain about my encoding at all (at least in Java 5).

MUTF-8 is mainly used for JNI and other systems with null-terminated strings. The only difference from normal UTF-8 is how U+0000 is encoded. Normal UTF-8 use 1 byte encoding (0x00) and MUTF-8 uses 2 bytes (0xC0 0x80). First of all, you shouldn't have U+0000 (an invalid codepoint) in any Unicode text. Secondly, DataInputStream.readUTF() doesn't enforce the encoding so it happily accepts either one.

EDIT: The Python code should look like this,

def writeUTF(data, str):
    utf8 = str.encode('utf-8')
    length = len(utf8)
    data.append(struct.pack('!H', length))
    format = '!' + str(length) + 's'
    data.append(struct.pack(format, utf8))