Question

I was once working on a Java application dealing with unicode processing – and as usual to begin with, I write some code and test it, then comment out the working code and add some new lines., and this process goes on till I find the solution

The exact issue I had was commenting out illegal Unicode strings. Some unicode wasn’t working and I wanted to just comment it out.. to my utter surprise, it wouldn’t work.

Example Code:

class UnicodeTester{
//char someCharacter = "\ux13d";
}

javac UnicodeTester.java

UnicodeTester.java:2: illegal unicode escape
//char someCharacter = "\ux13d";
                              ^
1 error

Is there a way where I can comment out illegal unicode sequences?? I read the Java Language Specification 2.2 & 2.3, The Lexical Grammar is enforced before the Syntactic Grammar. PERIOD. But what is the most effective workaround other than removing them from the source code??

Answer 1

You could work around it by inserting a space char after the backslash:

//char someCharacter = "\ ux13d";