10.1.3 Encoding

On some targets, the internal representation is UTF-16, which means that non-BMP Unicode codepoints are represented using surrogate pairs. The compile-time define target.utf16 is set when the target uses UTF-16 internally.

Null-bytes in strings

Some Haxe targets disallow null-bytes (Unicode codepoint 0) in strings. Additionally, some Haxe core APIs assume a null-byte terminates strings. To consistently deal with binary data, including null-bytes, use the haxe.io.Bytes API.

Target details

Target	target.unicode	target.utf16	Internal encoding	Null-byte allowed
Flash	yes	yes	UTF-16	no
JavaScript	yes	yes	UTF-16	yes (except in some old browsers)
C++	yes	yes	ASCII or UTF-16 (if needed)	yes
Java	yes	yes	UTF-16	yes
JVM	yes	yes	UTF-16	yes
C#	yes	yes	UTF-16	yes
Python	yes	no	Latin-1, UCS-2, or UCS-4 (see PEP 393)	yes
Lua	yes	no	UTF-8	yes
PHP	yes	no	binary	yes
Eval	yes	no	UTF-8	yes
Neko	no	no	binary	yes
HashLink	yes	yes	UTF-16	no

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