Character Set Encoding Classes and Methods

<< JDK (Java Development Kit) Tutorials

This chapter provides tutorial notes and example codes on character set related classes. Topics include collection types: what is character encoding; JDK supported encodings like: CP1252, ISO-8859, ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, GB18030; methods to encode characters to byte sequences; methods to decode byte sequences back to characters.

What Is Character Encoding?

Supported Character Encodings in JDK

Charset.encode() - Method to Encode Characters

Running EncodingSampler.java with CP1252 Encoding

Running EncodingSampler.java with ISO-8859-1 and US-ASCII

Running EncodingSampler.java with UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF16-BE

Running EncodingSampler.java with GB18030

Charset.decode() - Method to Decode Byte Sequences

Conclusion:

• JDK supports many encodings for many commonly used character sets like: CP1252, ISO-8859, ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, GB18030.
• The java.nio.charset.Charset.encode() allows you to encode characters to byte sequences according to a give encoding.
• The java.nio.charset.Charset.decode() allows you to decode byte sequences back to characters according to a give encoding.
• The JDK default encoding is CP1252 on Windows system.

Notes and sample codes bellow are based on JDK/J2SDK 1.4.1_01.