parsing utf8 string from server response

Question

I had implemented app on some device which was dealing with sending receiving data from server. Data from server would usually come in this form:

"1;username;someInteger;"

Parsing was easy, and I was using strtok as you can imagine to retrieve individual values from that string such as: 1 , username , and someInteger .

But now a situation may occur when the server will send me unicode string as username .

I think good idea is to use the username encoded as a UTF-8 string (am I right?). What do you recommend - how should I parse it from above string? What symbol to use as a separator for example (eg, instead of ";"), or which functions to use to extract the username from above string?

as this is some embedded device I want to avoid installing some third party libraries there (which might not be even possible) so more "pure" ways would be more desirable.

Answer 1

The character ';' is the same in UTF-8 as it is in ASCII, because the 127 first characters in both encodings are the same. That means you can still use strtok to split on the ';' .

Answer 2

The very thing with UTF8 is that you hardly have to do anything at all. ASCII characters still encode as the same ASCII bytes they always would, so if you just continue to use semicolon separators, you don't have to do anything at all.