Question

My application takes an input from the user. Some of the Asian user enter text with latin-like characters but encoded with Unicode range U+FF01–FF5E.
When I try to compare this input strings with something in ASCII they are not equal (as expected).

Here is Wikipedia article about the characters range http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_forms

How do I convert characters from that range to ASCII equivalents?

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

If these are the only characters you need to convert, you could use:

String convertLatinLikeToAscii(String text) {
    char[] chars = text.toCharArray();
    for (int i = 0; i < chars.length; i++) {
        char c = chars[i];
        if (c >= 0xff01 && c <= 0xff5e) {
            // Map U+FF01 to U+0021 etc
            chars[i] = (char) (c - (0xff01 - 0x21));
        }
    }
    return new String(chars);
}