Char set conversion to ASMO 708, KOI8-U, x-IA5-German

Question

hi,
I am doing some charset conversions to support various char sets widely used on the internet. The Character Sets I am supposed to support also include
"iso-8859-8-i", "ASMO-708", "koi8-u", "x-IA5-German".
However I don't find the canonical names for these encodings in the list of Supported Encodings by java.
I checked the i18n.jar but the ByteToChar classes for these encodings were not there. Is it possible to develop your own ByteToChar classes. If yes how?
Can anybody advise how to proceed forward with this?
Thanks,
Khurram

Answer 1

Hi Khurram,
You could catch the exceptions thrown by the String(byte[] bytes, String encoding) constructor and by thegetBytes(String encoding) method and then dispatch to your own encoding/decoding Code. Something like the following.
Post back if you need more elaboration.
Regards,
Joe
public class MyConverter {
        public static String makeString ( byte[] bytes, String encoding)
        throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
          String resultString= null;
        try {                                                                                                                                    
              resultString= new String (bytes, encoding);
               return resultString;
          catch      (UnsupportedEncodingException e1){
               try {
                    resultString =  convertBytes (bytes, encoding);
                    return resultString;
               catch  (UnsupportedEncodingException e2) {
                    throw new UnsupportedEncodingException();
        public static String convertBytes ( byte[] bytes, String encoding)
        throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
          String resultString= null;
          if (encoding.equalsIgnoreCase ("x-IA5-German")) {
               resultString =  bytesToStringx_IA5_German (bytes);
               return resultString;
          } else {
               throw new UnsupportedEncodingException();
        public static  String  bytesToStringx_IA5_German ( byte[] bytes) {
          //...here's where you put the actual decoding Code
}