On Jun 27, 2014, at 11:24 AM, Doug Cutting <cutt...@apache.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 9:40 AM, Pritchard, Charles X. -ND > <charles.x.pritchard....@disney.com> wrote: >> is there a means to coerce data written as byte[] into String (and the other >> way around) ? > > > (Int-to-float and long-to-float are both lossy promotions that we > already permit.) > > In the meantime, the standard Java APIs won't permit this conversion. > I posted a patch that adds support for promotion from string to bytes. > Would this be useful? If so, please add comments to the issue. > > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-1533 Thanks, I will post comments. One of the use cases has to do with Hive — there are times when we want to allow-in binary data but we’d like to view it as strings for ease of use with the rest of the stack, as most or all of the data would be UTF-8. In my experience, in this particular strange situation, when converting from binary to UTF-8, one would not throw an error but would instead use the UTF-8 characters for out-of-range bytes. I know there is particular vocabulary for it, but I can’t remember off the top of my head what that vocab is. Anyone converting binary to UTF-8 should already be aware that the operation can be lossy. -Charles
