Unicode string detection

I had the need to detect wether or not a given string (in .Net/C#) was unicode or not.. Specifically filenames. I had a situation where a filename might be passed to me, that could possibly contian unicode. If it DID contained unicode characters, I needed to run GetShortPathName and get the 8.3 filename for the file, before passing it into a legacy component that couldn't handle unicode names...

Well, a "big hammer approach" might just call GetShortPathName on every filename, just to be sure... But that's a costly API call if your having to do this a million times a second.

So, long story short, I wrote this little function to detect unicode in a c# .Net string:

        public static bool IsUnicode(string s)
        {
            return s != Marshal.PtrToStringAnsi(Marshal.StringToHGlobalAnsi(s));
        }

Now homework for all you kiddies out there... Is this code a memory leak? If so, what should you do to fix it? If not, why not?

How to get information about your current culture.

Instead of doing a college survery and asking a bunch of probing questions about the lives of twenty-somethings, there's an easier way to get information about your current culture. Just look at CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.

Here's a quick program that explains how to do that. This can be very useful in debugging and troubleshooting how your program behaves on machines that are setup for other laungages or regions.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Globalization;
 
namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args) 
        {
            CultureInfo currentCulture = CultureInfo.CurrentCulture;
            
            Console.WriteLine("CultureInfo");
            Console.WriteLine("-----------");
            Console.WriteLine("DisplayName: {0}", currentCulture.DisplayName);
            Console.WriteLine("Name: {0}", currentCulture.Name);
            Console.WriteLine("LCID: {0}", currentCulture.LCID);
            Console.WriteLine();
             
            Console.WriteLine("NumberFormatInfo");
            Console.WriteLine("----------------");
            Console.WriteLine("Decimal Seperator: {0}", currentCulture.NumberFormat.NumberDecimalSeparator);
            Console.Write("Digits: ");
             
            foreach (string s in currentCulture.NumberFormat.NativeDigits)
            {
                Console.Write(s + " ");
            }
 
            Console.WriteLine();
        }
    }
} 

Base output should look like:

CultureInfo
-----------
DisplayName: English (United States)
Name: en-US
LCID: 1033

 

NumberFormatInfo
----------------
Decimal Seperator: .
Digits: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9