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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T02:37:44+00:00

A Java char is 2 bytes (max size of 65,536) but there are 95,221

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A Java char is 2 bytes (max size of 65,536) but there are 95,221 Unicode characters. Does this mean that you can’t handle certain Unicode characters in a Java application?

Does this boil down to what character encoding you are using?

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  1. Editorial Team

    You can handle them all if you’re careful enough.

    Java’s char is a UTF-16 code unit. For characters with code-point > 0xFFFF it will be encoded with 2 chars (a surrogate pair).

    See http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/java/supplementary-142654.html for how to handle those characters in Java.

    (BTW, in Unicode 5.2 there are 107,154 assigned characters out of 1,114,112 slots.)

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