Today, Railgun Labs proudly announces Charisma – a safe Unicode® character decoder and encoder written in C99.

Charisma provides functions for decoding and encoding Unicode characters safely in UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 (big or little endian) from both null and non-null terminated strings. It is designed to gracefully recover from malformed characters, allowing decoding to continue.

Why Charisma?

There are many Unicode character decoders floating about, but most are unsafe and cannot recover from malformed characters. Using such decoders exposes software to critical security risks. Charisma is a robust character decoder, built to safely decode text without compromise.

Safety Matters

The Unicode Standard defines several encoding forms, with UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 being the most popular. Malformed characters within these encoding forms can be exploited by malicious actors, creating vulnerabilities in software.

Charisma helps mitigate this risk by offering secure decoders that not only detect but also recover from malformed characters, ensuring safe and continuous decoding.

MISRA C:2012 Compliant

Charisma adheres to the MISRA C:2012 guidelines, meeting all Required, Mandatory, and Advisory rules. A compliance table is available here.

Related Work

Charisma focuses on safe Unicode character decoding and encoding. For other Unicode algorithms, such as normalization or collation, check out Unicorn.