[CASSANDRA-2367] Cleanup conversions between bytes and strings

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Low
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.7.5
• Severity: Low
• Assignee: Sylvain Lebresne
• Reporter: Sylvain Lebresne

Authors

Sylvain Lebresne

Reviewers

Jonathan Ellis

• Created: 23/Mar/11 14:22
• Updated: 16/Apr/19 09:33
• Resolved: 28/Mar/11 21:06

Description

There is a bit of inconsistency in our conversions between ByteBuffers and Strings.
For instance, ByteBufferUtil.string() uses as a default the java default charset, while ByteBufferUtil.bytes(String) assumes UTF8. Moreover, a number of places in the code don't use those functions and uses getBytes() directly. There again, we often encode with the default charset but decode in UTF8 or the contrary.

Using the default charset is probably a bad idea anyway, since this depends on the actual system the node is running on and could lead to a stupid bug when running in heterogeneous systems.

This ticket proposes to always assume UTF8 all over the place (and tries to use the ByteBufferUtil as much as possible to help with that).