Reliance on default encoding, what should I use and why?

Question

FindBugs reports a bug:

Reliance on default encoding Found a call to a method which will perform a byte to String (or String to byte) conversion, a

Answer 1

Ideally, it should be:

try (InputStream in = new FileInputStream(file);
     Reader reader = new InputStreamReader(in, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
     BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(reader)) {

...or:

try (BufferedReader br = Files.newBufferedReader(path, StandardCharsets.UTF_8)) {

...assuming the file is encoded as UTF-8.

Pretty much every encoding that isn't a Unicode Transformation Format is obsolete for natural language data. There are languages you cannot support without Unicode.