Character Set Converters

Characters can be represented as binary numbers . This is normally referred to as an encoding scheme. The most common scheme used for English text is called the ISO Latin-1 encoding. The set of characters supported by any one encoding is said to be its character set, which includes all possible characters that can be represented by the encoding. Usually, the first 127 codes of an encoding correspond to the almost universally accepted ASCII character set, which includes all the standard characters and punctuation marks. Nevertheless, most encoding schemes can vary radically , especially because some, such as Chinese and Japanese encoding schemes, have character sets that bear little resemblance to the English set.

The SDK 1.3 supports the encodings shown in Table 24.4. The Java 2 Runtime Environment, 1.3 Standard Edition, for Windows comes in two different versions: US-only and international. The US-only version only supports the encodings shown in table 24.4. The international version (which includes the lib/i18n.jar file) supports the encodings shown in Table 24.4 and many more. In fact, too many to list here. For the encodings supported in the i18n.jar, see the internationalization documentation under the JAVA_HOME/ docs/guide/intl directory.

Table 24.4. Standard Java Character Encodings

ASCII	American Standard Code for Information Interchange
Cp1252	Windows-Latin-1
ISO8859_1	ISO 8859-1, Latin alphabet No. 1
UnicodeBig	Sixteen-bit Unicode Transformation Format, big-endian byte order, with byte-order mark
UnicodeBigUnmarked	Sixteen-bit Unicode Transformation Format, big-endian byte order
UnicodeLittle	Sixteen-bit Unicode Transformation Format, little-endian byte order, with byte-order mark
UnicodeLittleUnmarked	Sixteen-bit Unicode Transformation Format, little-endian byte order
UTF8	Eight-bit Unicode Transformation Format
UTF-16	Sixteen-bit Unicode Transformation Format, byte order specified by a mandatory initial byte-order mark