8354968: Replace unicode sequences in comment text with UTF-8 characters

[magicus]

As part of the UTF-8 cleaning up done in JDK-8301971, I looked at where and how we are using unicode sequences (\uXXXX). In several string literals, I think the unicode sequences still has merit, if they improve clarity or readability of the code. Some instances are more gray zone. But the places where it does not make sense at all are in comments, as part of fluid text comments. There they are just disruptive and not helpful at all. I tried to locate all such places (but I might have missed places, I did not do a proper lexical analysis to find comments) and fix them.

99% of this fix is to turn poor Peter von der Ah\u00e9 into Peter von der Ahé. 😆

I checked some random samples on when this was introduced to see if there were some particular commit that mistreated the encoding, but they have been there since the original release of the open JDK source code.

There are likely many more places where direct UTF-8 encoded characters is preferable to unicode sequences, but this seemed like a safe and trivial first start.

---

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Issue

• JDK-8354968: Replace unicode sequences in comment text with UTF-8 characters (Bug - P4)

Reviewers

• Naoto Sato (@naotoj - Reviewer)

Reviewing

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[bridgekeeper]

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[openjdk]

@magicus This change now passes all automated pre-integration checks.

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After integration, the commit message for the final commit will be:

8354968: Replace unicode sequences in comment text with UTF-8 characters

Reviewed-by: naoto

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At the time when this comment was updated there had been 4 new commits pushed to the master branch:

• 0e0bd64: 8356441: IllegalStateException in RichDiagnosticFormatter after JDK-8355065
• 9ebb5d4: 8346255: java/lang/management/ThreadMXBean/VirtualThreadDeadlocks.java finds no deadlock
• 411a63e: 8356251: Need minor cleanup for interp_only_mode
• ... and 1 more: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/compare/a091e2f2810da17ff61a63fd0f1f6538f1bdbb70...master

As there are no conflicts, your changes will automatically be rebased on top of these commits when integrating. If you prefer to avoid this automatic rebasing, please check the documentation for the /integrate command for further details.

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[openjdk]

@magicus The following labels will be automatically applied to this pull request:

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• core-libs
• i18n

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[mlbridge]

Webrevs

• 03: Full - Incremental (53aa4066)
• 02: Full - Incremental (dd9a77c5)
• 01: Full - Incremental (694b33dc)
• 00: Full (ae1166af)

[magicus]

Now that JDK-8301971 is committed, this PR is ready to be integrated.

[naotoj]

LGTM. Thanks for the changes

[mlbridge]

Mailing list message from Jonathan Gibbons on compiler-dev:

As a point of history, a long time ago (including Peter Ah?'s time), it
was policy to use ASCII encoding, and not any richer character set.

Last time I looked, there was still some discrepancies in the makefiles
for the encoding used for `javac` and `javadoc`.

-- Jon

On 4/17/25 7:48 AM, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:

[magicus]

/integrate

[openjdk]

Going to push as commit a3e094e.
Since your change was applied there have been 82 commits pushed to the master branch:

• dd25159: 8356644: Update encoding declaration to UTF-8
• e07c65b: 8323545: java/awt/GraphicsDevice/CheckDisplayModes.java fails with "exit code: 133"
• 2c4e8d2: 8347712: IllegalStateException on multithreaded ZipFile access with non-UTF8 charset
• ... and 79 more: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/compare/a091e2f2810da17ff61a63fd0f1f6538f1bdbb70...master

Your commit was automatically rebased without conflicts.

[openjdk]

@magicus Pushed as commit a3e094e.

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