How do I truncate a java string to fit in a given number of bytes, once UTF-8 encoded?

Question

How do I truncate a java String so that I know it will fit in a given number of bytes storage once it is UTF-8 encoded?

Answer 1

Here is a simple loop that counts how big the UTF-8 representation is going to be, and truncates when it is exceeded:

public static String truncateWhenUTF8(String s, int maxBytes) {
    int b = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++) {
        char c = s.charAt(i);

        // ranges from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
        int skip = 0;
        int more;
        if (c <= 0x007f) {
            more = 1;
        }
        else if (c <= 0x07FF) {
            more = 2;
        } else if (c <= 0xd7ff) {
            more = 3;
        } else if (c <= 0xDFFF) {
            // surrogate area, consume next char as well
            more = 4;
            skip = 1;
        } else {
            more = 3;
        }

        if (b + more > maxBytes) {
            return s.substring(0, i);
        }
        b += more;
        i += skip;
    }
    return s;
}

This does handle surrogate pairs that appear in the input string. Java's UTF-8 encoder (correctly) outputs surrogate pairs as a single 4-byte sequence instead of two 3-byte sequences, so truncateWhenUTF8() will return the longest truncated string it can. If you ignore surrogate pairs in the implementation then the truncated strings may be shorted than they needed to be.

I haven't done a lot of testing on that code, but here are some preliminary tests:

private static void test(String s, int maxBytes, int expectedBytes) {
    String result = truncateWhenUTF8(s, maxBytes);
    byte[] utf8 = result.getBytes(Charset.forName("UTF-8"));
    if (utf8.length > maxBytes) {
        System.out.println("BAD: our truncation of " + s + " was too big");
    }
    if (utf8.length != expectedBytes) {
        System.out.println("BAD: expected " + expectedBytes + " got " + utf8.length);
    }
    System.out.println(s + " truncated to " + result);
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
    test("abcd", 0, 0);
    test("abcd", 1, 1);
    test("abcd", 2, 2);
    test("abcd", 3, 3);
    test("abcd", 4, 4);
    test("abcd", 5, 4);

    test("a\u0080b", 0, 0);
    test("a\u0080b", 1, 1);
    test("a\u0080b", 2, 1);
    test("a\u0080b", 3, 3);
    test("a\u0080b", 4, 4);
    test("a\u0080b", 5, 4);

    test("a\u0800b", 0, 0);
    test("a\u0800b", 1, 1);
    test("a\u0800b", 2, 1);
    test("a\u0800b", 3, 1);
    test("a\u0800b", 4, 4);
    test("a\u0800b", 5, 5);
    test("a\u0800b", 6, 5);

    // surrogate pairs
    test("\uD834\uDD1E", 0, 0);
    test("\uD834\uDD1E", 1, 0);
    test("\uD834\uDD1E", 2, 0);
    test("\uD834\uDD1E", 3, 0);
    test("\uD834\uDD1E", 4, 4);
    test("\uD834\uDD1E", 5, 4);

}

Updated Modified code example, it now handles surrogate pairs.