Java App : Unable to read iso-8859-1 encoded file correctly

Question

I have a file which is encoded as iso-8859-1, and contains characters such as ô .

I am reading this file with java code, something like:

File in = n         


        

Answer 1

Parsing the file as fixed-size blocks of bytes is not good --- what if some character has a byte representation that straddles across two blocks? Use an InputStreamReader with the appropriate character encoding instead:

 BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(
         new InputStreamReader(
         new FileInputStream("myfile.csv"), "ISO-8859-1");

 char[] buffer = new char[4096]; // character (not byte) buffer 

 while (true)
 {
      int charCount = br.read(buffer, 0, buffer.length);

      if (charCount == -1) break; // reached end-of-stream 

      String s = String.valueOf(buffer, 0, charCount);
      // alternatively, we can append to a StringBuilder

      System.out.println(s);
 }

Btw, remember to check that the unicode character can indeed be displayed correctly. You could also redirect the program output to a file and then compare it with the original file.

As Jon Skeet suggests, the problem may also be console-related. Try System.console().printf(s) to see if there is a difference.