From Unicode to IS08859_1 conversion

Question

Hi everybody!
I'm trying simply to correctly display some special characters like �,�,�,�,�,�.
I can decode correctly any RFC2047 compliant string, but the output string is in Unicode(UTF8) format, since this is the Java's native charset.
Then I tried to convert the string to the ISO-8859-1 another charset in two ways:
1) string = new String(string.getBytes(),"ISO8859_1");
2) import sun.io.CharToByteConverter;
CharToByteConverter fromUnicode = CharToByteConverter.getConverter("ISO8859_1");
string = new String(fromUnicode.convertAll(string.toCharArray()));
Both of these gave me the same result.
Are they equivalent? (yes, I suppose).
Anyway, trying to convert to some charsets (like SJIS, Cp307) it works fine, but trying to convert to other charsets (ISO8859_1, Cp1202) it seems not to perform any conversion:
the result is the same I obtain deleting the code descripted above.
Can anyone give me help?
Thank you all.
Gi_gio.

Answer 1

1) string = new String(string.getBytes(),"ISO8859_1");This is likely to do nothing because here's what happens: It converts "string" to an array of bytes using the default encoding for your platform, which is most likely ISO8859-1. Then it converts that array of bytes back to a String, using ISO8859-1. So... no change.
Every time you think "I need a string in xxx format", slap yourself on the hand. A Java String is not in any format but Unicode. There is no such thing as a UTF-8 String or an ISO8859-1 String. If you need data in a particular encoding, you need an array of bytes in that encoding. In other words if you need your String in ISO8859-1 encoding, you do this:
bytes b[] = string.getBytes("ISO8859_1");