2.19.1 Wide character encodings on streams

Although characters are uniquely coded using the Unicode standard internally, streams and files are byte (8-bit) oriented and there are a variety of ways to represent the larger Unicode codes in an 8-bit octet stream. The most popular one, especially in the context of the web, is UTF-8. Bytes 0 ... 127 represent simply the corresponding US-ASCII character, while bytes 128 ... 255 are used for multi-byte encoding of characters placed higher in the Unicode space. Especially on MS-Windows the 16-bit UTF-16 standard, represented by pairs of bytes, is also popular.

Prolog I/O streams have a property called encoding which specifies the used encoding that influences get_code/2 and put_code/2 as well as all the other text I/O predicates.

The default encoding for files is derived from the Prolog flag encoding, which is initialised from setlocale(LC_CTYPE, NULL) to one of text, utf8 or iso_latin_1. One of the latter two is used if the encoding name is recognized, while text is used as default. Using text, the translation is left to the wide-character functions of the C library.^{40The Prolog native UTF-8 mode is considerably faster than the generic mbrtowc() one.} The encoding can be specified explicitly in load_files/2 for loading Prolog source with an alternative encoding, open/4 when opening files or using set_stream/2 on any open stream. For Prolog source files we also provide the encoding/1 directive that can be used to switch between encodings that are compatible with US-ASCII (ascii, iso_latin_1, utf8 and many locales). See also section 3.1.3 for writing Prolog files with non-US-ASCII characters and section 2.16.1.9 for syntax issues. For additional information and Unicode resources, please visit http://www.unicode.org/.

SWI-Prolog currently defines and supports the following encodings:

octet

Default encoding for binary streams. This causes the stream to be read and written fully untranslated.

ascii

7-bit encoding in 8-bit bytes. Equivalent to iso_latin_1, but generates errors and warnings on encountering values above 127.

iso_latin_1

8-bit encoding supporting many Western languages. This causes the stream to be read and written fully untranslated. The above is the SWI-Prolog native name. This encoding may be specified using the official IANA name ISO-8859-1.

text

C library default locale encoding for text files. Files are read and written using the C library functions mbrtowc() and wcrtomb(). This may be the same as one of the other encodings, notably it may be the same as iso_latin_1 for Western languages and utf8 in a UTF-8 context.

utf8

Multi-byte encoding of full Unicode, compatible with ascii. See above. The above is the SWI-Prolog native name. This encoding may be specified using the official IANA name UTF-8.

utf16be

utf16le

UTF-16 encoding. Reads input in pairs of bytes. utf16be is Big Endian, putting the most significant byte first and utf16le is Little Endian, putting the most significant byte second. UTF-16 can represent full Unicode using surrogate pairs. The above are the SWI-Prolog native names. These encodings may be specified using the official IANA names UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE. For backward compatibility we also support unicode_be and unicode_le.

Note that not all encodings can represent all characters. This implies that writing text to a stream may cause errors because the stream cannot represent these characters. The behaviour of a stream on these errors can be controlled using set_stream/2. Initially the terminal stream writes the characters using Prolog escape sequences while other streams generate an I/O exception.

2.19.1.1 BOM: Byte Order Mark

From section 2.19.1, you may have got the impression that text files are complicated. This section deals with a related topic, making life often easier for the user, but providing another worry to the programmer. BOM or Byte Order Marker is a technique for identifying Unicode text files as well as the encoding they use. Such files start with the Unicode character 0xFEFF, a non-breaking, zero-width space character. This is a pretty unique sequence that is not likely to be the start of a non-Unicode file and uniquely distinguishes the various Unicode file formats. As it is a zero-width blank, it even doesn't produce any output. This solves all problems, or ... Some formats start off as US-ASCII and may contain some encoding mark to switch to UTF-8, such as the encoding="UTF-8" in an XML header. Such formats often explicitly forbid the use of a UTF-8 BOM. In other cases there is additional information revealing the encoding, making the use of a BOM redundant or even illegal.

The BOM is handled by SWI-Prolog open/4 predicate. By default, text files are probed for the BOM when opened for reading. If a BOM is found, the encoding is set accordingly and the property bom(true) is available through stream_property/2. When opening a file for writing, writing a BOM can be requested using the option bom(true) with open/4.