Convert UTF-8 (Unicode) Hex to Hex Byte Sequence while reading file

Question

Hi all,
When java reads a utf-8 character, it does so in hex e.g \x12AB format. How can we read the utf-8 chaacter as a corresponding byte stream (e.g \x0905 is hex for some hindi character (an Indic language) and it's corresponding byte sequence is \xE0\x45\x96).
can the method to read UTF-8 character byte sequence be used to read any other (other than Utf 8, say some proprietary font) character set's byte sequence?

Answer 1

First, there's no such thing as a "UTF-8 character". UTF-8 is a character encoding that can be used to encode any character in the Unicode database.
If you want to read the raw bytes, use an InputStream. If you want to read text that's encoded as UTF-8, wrap the InputStream in an InputStreamReader and specify UTF-8 as the encoding. If the text is in some other encoding, specify that instead of UTF-8 when you construct the InputStreamReader. import java.io.*;
public class Test
  // DEVANAGARI LETTER A (अ) in UTF-8 encoding (U+0905)
  static final byte[] source = { (byte)0xE0, (byte)0xA4, (byte)0x85 };
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
    // print raw bytes
    InputStream is = new ByteArrayInputStream(source);
    int read = -1;
    while ((read = is.read()) != -1)
      System.out.printf("0x%02X ", read);
    System.out.println();
    is.reset();
    // print character as Unicode escape
    Reader r = new InputStreamReader(is, "UTF-8");
    while ((read = r.read()) != -1)
      System.out.printf("\\u%04X ", read);
    System.out.println();
    r.close();
} Does that answer your question?