Java Strings Character Encoding - For French - Dutch Locales

Question

I have the following piece of code

public static void main(String[] args) throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
        System.out.println(Charset.defaultCha         


        

Answer 1

Line #1 - the default character set on your system is windows-1252.

Line #2 - you created a String by encoding a String literal to UTF-8 bytes, and then decoding it using the UTF-8 scheme. The result is correctly formed String, which can be output correctly using windows-1252 encoding.

Line #3 - you created a String by encoding a string literal as windows-1252, and then decoding it using UTF-8. The UTF-8 decoder has detected a sequence that cannot possibly be UTF-8, and has replaced the offending character with a question mark"?". (The UTF-8 format says that any byte that has the top bit set to 1 is one byte of a multi-byte character. But the windows-1252 encoding is just one byte long .... ergo, this is bad UTF-8)

Line #4 - you created a String by encoding in UTF-8 and then decoding in windows-1252. In this case the decoding has not "failed", but it has produced garbage (aka mojibake). The reason you got 2 characters of output is that the UTF-8 encoding of "é" is a 2 byte sequence.

Line #5 - you created a String by encoding as windows-1252 and decoding as windows-1252. This produce the correct output.

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And the overall lesson is that if you encode characters to bytes with one character encoding, and then decode with a different character encoding you are liable to get mangling of one form or another.