Difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16?

Question

Difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16? Why do we need these?

MessageDigest md = MessageDigest.getInstance(\"SHA-256\");
String text = \"This is some text\";

m         


        

Answer 1

This is unrelated to UTF-8/16 (in general, although it does convert to UTF16 and the BE/LE part can be set w/ a single line), yet below is the fastest way to convert String to byte[]. For instance: good exactly for the case provided (hash code). String.getBytes(enc) is relatively slow.

static byte[] toBytes(String s){
        byte[] b=new byte[s.length()*2];
        ByteBuffer.wrap(b).asCharBuffer().put(s);
        return b;
    }