Extended ASCII characters

[InfiniteTabs]

Question
I'm running into an issue where characters like 'ö' throwing an error, then I noticed this part in the code:

bool get isAscii {
    for (var cu in codeUnits) {
      if (cu > 127) return false;
    }
    return true;
  }

Is there a reason to not include all 255 ASCII characters?

Best regards

[simc]

Hive supports UTF-8 characters for values and ASCII for keys. The reason is that decoding ASCII characters is A LOT faster in Dart than decoding UTF-8 which improves Box opening times significantly.

Edit: ASCII only has 127 characters. Everything beyond is UTF-8.

[InfiniteTabs]

Thanks a lot for your reply!

Do you know any good ways of converting UTF-8 to ASCII in dart/flutter? I'm thinking about just converting the key right before reading/writing in Hive, for instance replacing any invalid character with \xx.

Best regards

[simc]

I recommend using the dartx String.chars extension.

[apoleo88]

I recommend using the dartx String.chars extension.

.chars or .characters converts from string to a list of unicode char. I don't understand how to get to ascii from there.

I am trying to use as a key a list of bytes, converting it somehow to unicode, but I keep bumping in conversion errors or invalid characters.
Can you please provide an example and add it to the documentation?

[InfiniteTabs]

Another solution that allows you to use any character is to use base64-encoding, so both when you read or write you can use the encoded key.

final String encodedKey = base64.encode(utf8.encode(key));
box.put(encodedKey, json);