Charset conversation problem.

Question

Hi!
I wanted to transform a ISO-8559-15 byte-Array into a valid Java String using
byte[] data = ...;
Charset iso_8559_15 = Charset.forName("ISO-8559-15");
String s = iso_8559_15.decode(ByteBuffer.wrap(data)).toString();s inclodes stranges byte-set which are neighter of UTF-8 nor ISO-8559-15 origin when writing them to a file using FileWriter.
It works perfectly well using
byte[] data = ...;
String s = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new ByteArrayInputStream(data))).readLine();Can you tell me whats wrong with using Charset/CharsetDecoder?

Answer 1

Probably you mean ISO-8859-15.
Check System.getProperty("file.encoding") - this is the default encoding.
I suppose it is different than ISO-8859-15 (if your second approach gives different results).
The simple way to convert byte array to string with desired charset is:
String str = new String(data, "ISO-8859-15");If you still do not achieve readable strings, check your input data.
Probably you have not-printable chars - for ISO-8859-15 in range 120-160 or most of these bellow 32.
(simple description and chars table can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-15).