Re: How to specify encoding in Java?

From: chris (chris_at_kiffer.eunet.be)
Date: 01/24/04 

Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2004 23:32:29 +0100

Konrad Den Ende wrote:

> I've been looking around and i've been given some hints but
> i simply can't get to the bottom of it. How do i specify the
> character encoding for reading text froma file?

Depends a bit on what you mean exactly by "read text from a file"; at some
point you have to convert bytes to chars (either by converting a byte[] to
a String or by wrapping an InputStream in a Reader), and you should find
that the method (or constructor) you used to do that is capable of taking a
parameter which specifies the encoding. If you don't give one then it will
use the default encoding, which IIRC is specified by the system property
"file.encoding"; which in turn probably defaults to "8859_1". If you want
to mix German and Chinese then you frobaly want to use "UTF-8".

Since this is 2004 (not to mention 4702) I am obliged to inform you that
you have much better control over character encoding if you use java.nio. 

-- 
Chris Gray      chris@kiffer.eunet.be
/k/ Embedded Java Solutions

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