Manipulating strings in JNI

Strings are somewhat complicated in JNI, mainly because Java strings and C strings are internally different. This recipe will cover the most commonly used JNI string features.

Getting ready

Understanding the basics of encoding is essential to comprehend the differences between Java string and C string. We'll give a brief introduction to Unicode.

According to the Unicode Consortium, the Unicode Standard is defined as follows:

The Unicode Standard is a character coding system designed to support the worldwide interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages and technical disciplines of the modern world. In addition, it supports classical and historical texts of many written languages.

Unicode assigns a unique number for each character it defines, called code point. There are mainly two categories of encoding methods that support the entire Unicode character set, or a subset of it.

The first one is the Unicode Transformation Format...