[ID3 Dev] My mp3 tagging code can't handle Unicode tags

[Audio Ranger Development]

Peter, Louis,

when using a programming language that supports Unicode strings (like 
Java or .NET), you can simply determine whether any given string can be 
encoded with ISO-8859-1 or not as follows (pseudo code):

bool canBeISOEncoded(String s)
{
   for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++)
   {
     if (s.charAt(i) > 0xFF)
       return (false);
   }
   return (true);
}

The simple trick is to just check if the Unicode string contains any 
characters with a value of > U+FF (decimal 255). If yes, you need to 
encode the String as Unicode. If not, the chars fit into ISO-8859-1.

If you need to go for Unicode, common encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 or 
UTF-32. Each encoding has advantages and disadvantages. Regarding ID3 
tags, you should use UTF-16 and ID3 version 2.3 tags in order to 
maximize compatibility with other implementations.

Hope this helps.

Kind regards,
Mathias Kunter
Developer of Magic MP3 Tagger


Am 28.01.2011 00:26, schrieb Peter Bennett:
 > Here is my code that does this in java. Note that for ID3v2.3 only
 > encoding types 01 and 1 are valid("ISO-8859-1" and "UTF16"). the other
 > two values are valid for ID3V2.4, which is not widely supported, so I do
 > not recommend using them.
 >
 > static final String[] ENC_TYPES = {"ISO-8859-1", "UTF16",
 > "UTF-16BE", "UTF-8"};
 >
 > // Attempt to encode in encoding 0, if not possible use encoding 1
 > static public byte [] encodeString(String source, byte[] encodingB)
 > throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
 > byte [] result = source.getBytes(ENC_TYPES[encodingB[0]]);
 > if (encodingB[0] == 0) {
 > String checkResult = new String(result,ENC_TYPES[encodingB[0]]);
 > if (!source.equals(checkResult)) {
 > encodingB[0] = 1;
 > result = source.getBytes(ENC_TYPES[encodingB[0]]);
 > }
 > }
 > return result;
 >
 > }


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