Java String encoding (UTF-8)

Question

I have come across this line of legacy code, which I am trying to figure out:

String newString = new String(oldString.getBytes(\"UTF-8\"), \"UTF-8\"));
         


        

Answer 1

This could be complicated way of doing

String newString = new String(oldString);

This shortens the String is the underlying char[] used is much longer.

However more specifically it will be checking that every character can be UTF-8 encoded.

There are some "characters" you can have in a String which cannot be encoded and these would be turned into ?

Any character between \uD800 and \uDFFF cannot be encoded and will be turned into '?'

String oldString = "\uD800";
String newString = new String(oldString.getBytes("UTF-8"), "UTF-8");
System.out.println(newString.equals(oldString));

prints

false