Hi Fabian,
Thank you for taking my email.
TextInputFormat.setCharsetName("UTF-16") appears to set the private
variable TextInputFormat.charsetName.
It doesn't appear to cause additional behavior that would help interpret
UTF-16 data.
The method I've tested is calling
DelimitedInputFormat.setCharset("UTF-16"), which then sets
TextInputFormat.charsetName and then modifies the previously set
delimiterString to construct the proper byte string encoding of the the
delimiter. This same charsetName is also used in
TextInputFormat.readRecord() to interpret the bytes read from the file.
There are two problems that this implementation would seem to have when
using UTF-16.
1. delimiterString.getBytes(getCharset()) in DelimitedInputFormat.java
will return a Big Endian byte sequence including the Byte Order Mark (BOM).
The actual text file will not contain a BOM at each line ending, so the
delimiter will never be read. Moreover, if the actual byte encoding of the
file is Little Endian, the bytes will be interpreted incorrectly.
2. TextInputFormat.readRecord() will not see a BOM each time it decodes
a byte sequence with the String(bytes, offset, numBytes, charset) call.
Therefore, it will assume Big Endian, which may not always be correct.
While there are likely many solutions, I would think that all of them would
have to start by reading the BOM from the file when a Split is opened and
then using that BOM to modify the specified encoding to a BOM specific one
when the caller doesn't specify one, and to overwrite the caller's
specification if the BOM is in conflict with the caller's specification.
That is, if the BOM indicates Little Endian and the caller indicates
UTF-16BE, Flink should rewrite the charsetName as UTF-16LE.
I hope this makes sense and that I haven't been testing incorrectly or
misreading the code.
Thank you,
David
On Thu, Aug 9, 2018 at 4:04 AM Fabian Hueske <fhue...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> Did you try to set the encoding on the TextInputFormat with
>
> TextInputFormat tif = ...
> tif.setCharsetName("UTF-16");
>
> Best, Fabian
>
> 2018-08-08 17:45 GMT+02:00 David Dreyfus <dddrey...@gmail.com>:
>
>> Hello -
>>
>> It does not appear that Flink supports a charset encoding of "UTF-16". It
>> particular, it doesn't appear that Flink consumes the Byte Order Mark (BOM)
>> to establish whether a UTF-16 file is UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE. Are there any
>> plans to enhance Flink to handle UTF-16 with BOM?
>>
>> Thank you,
>> David
>>
>
>
