Converting UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 in Java

Question

I am reading an XML document (UTF-8) and ultimately displaying the content on a Web page using ISO-8859-1. As expected, there are a few characters are not displayed correctl

Answer 1

Depending on your default encoding, following lines could cause problem,

byte[] latin1 = sb.toString().getBytes("ISO-8859-1");

return new String(latin1);

In Java, String/Char is always in UTF-16BE. Different encoding is only involved when you convert the characters to bytes. Say your default encoding is UTF-8, the latin1 buffer is treated as UTF-8 and some sequence of Latin-1 may form invalid UTF-8 sequence and you will get ?.