CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaencodingisoutf
Guilherme Paz
Guilherme Paz

Reputation: 131

When is encoding being relevant in Java?

This might be a bit beginner question but it's fairly relevant considering debbuging encoding in Java: At what point is an encoding being relevant to a String object?

Consider I have a String object that I want to save to a file. Is the String object itself using some sort of encoding I should manipulate or this encoding will only be informed by me when I create a stream of bytes to save?

The same applies to importing: when I open a file and get it's bytes, I assume there's no encoding at hand, only bytes. When I parse this bytes to a String, I got to use an encoding to understand what characters are they. After I parse those bytes, the String (in memory) has some sort of meta information with the encoding or this is only being handled by the JVM?

This is vital considering I'm having file import/export issues and I got to understand at which point I should worry about getting the right encoding.

Hope I explained my doubt well, and thank you in advance!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 70

Answers (2)

ControlAltDel
ControlAltDel

Reputation: 35011

Encoding is important to String when you are de/serializing from disk or the web. There are multiple text file formats: ascii, latin-1, utf-8/16 (I believe there may be two utf-16 formats, but I'm not 100%)

See InputStreamReader for how to load a String from text encoded in a non-default format

Upvotes: 1

Solomon Slow
Solomon Slow

Reputation: 27115

Java strings do not have explicit encoding information. They don't know where they came from, and they don't know where they are going. All Java strings are stored internally as UTF-16.

You (optionally) specify what encoding to use whenever you want to turn a String into a sequence of bytes (e.g., to save to a file), or when you want to turn a sequence of bytes (e.g., read from a file) into a String.

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions