How to convert string in UTF-8 to ASCII ignoring errors and removing non ASCII characters - scala

Question

I am new to Scala.
Please advise how to convert strings in UTF-8 to ASCII ignoring errors and removing non ASCII characters in output.
For example, how to remove non ASCII character \uc382 from result string: "hello���", so that "hello" is printed in output.
scala.io.Source.fromBytes("hello\uc382".getBytes ("UTF-8"), "US-ASCII").mkString

Answer 1

val str = "hello\uc382"
str.filter(_ <= 0x7f) // keep only valid ASCII characters

Answer 2

If you had text in UTF-8 as bytes that is now in a String then it was converted.
If you have text in a String and you want it in ASCII as bytes, you can convert it later.
It seems that you just want to filter for only the UTF-16 code units for the C0 Controls and Basic Latin codepoints. Fortunately, such codepoints take only one code unit so we can filter them directly without converting them to codepoints.
"hello\uC382"
.filter(Character.UnicodeBlock.of(_) == Character.UnicodeBlock.BASIC_LATIN)
.getBytes(StandardCharsets.US_ASCII)
.foreach {
println }
With the question generalized to an arbitrary, known character encoding, filtering doesn't do the job. Instead, the feature of the encoder to ignore characters that are not present in the target Charset can be used. An Encoder requires a bit more wrapping and unwrapping. (The API design is based on streaming and reusing the buffer within the same stream and even other streams.) So, with ISO_8859_1 as an example:
val encoder = StandardCharsets.ISO_8859_1
.newEncoder()
.onMalformedInput(CodingErrorAction.IGNORE)
.onUnmappableCharacter(CodingErrorAction.IGNORE)
val string = "ñhello\uc382"
println(string)
val chars = CharBuffer.allocate(string.length())
.put(string)
chars.rewind()
val buffer = encoder.encode(chars)
val bytes = Array.ofDim[Byte](buffer.remaining())
buffer.get(bytes)
println(bytes)
bytes
.foreach {
println }