How do I convert between ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 in Java?

Question

Does anyone know how to convert a string from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 and back in Java?

I'm getting a string from the web and saving it in the RMS (J2ME), but I want to preserve the special chars and get the string from the RMS but with the ISO-8859-1 encoding. How do I do this?

Answer 1

Charsets might do it.

Answer 2

byte bytes[] = string.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
String s = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");

Answer 3

If you have a String, you can do that:

String s = "test";
try {
    s.getBytes("UTF-8");
} catch(UnsupportedEncodingException uee) {
    uee.printStackTrace();
}

If you have a 'broken' String, you did something wrong, converting a String to a String in another encoding is defenetely not the way to go! You can convert a String to a byte[] and vice-versa (given an encoding). In Java Strings are AFAIK encoded with UTF-16 but that's an implementation detail.

Say you have a InputStream, you can read in a byte[] and then convert that to a String using

byte[] bs = ...;
String s;
try {
    s = new String(bs, encoding);
} catch(UnsupportedEncodingException uee) {
    uee.printStackTrace();
}

or even better (thanks to erickson) use InputStreamReader like that:

InputStreamReader isr;
try {
     isr = new InputStreamReader(inputStream, encoding);
} catch(UnsupportedEncodingException uee) {
    uee.printStackTrace();
}

Answer 4

In general, you can't do this. UTF-8 is capable of encoding any Unicode code point. ISO-8859-1 can handle only a tiny fraction of them. So, transcoding from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 is no problem. Going backwards from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 will cause "replacement characters" (�) to appear in your text when unsupported characters are found.

To transcode text:

byte[] utf8 = new String(latin1, "ISO-8859-1").getBytes("UTF-8");

or

byte[] latin1 = new String(utf8, "UTF-8").getBytes("ISO-8859-1");

You can exercise more control by using the lower-level Charset APIs. For example, you can raise an exception when an un-encodable character is found, or use a different character for replacement text.

Answer 5

I could enconde an iso-8859-1 String that came from a DB to utf-8 with the following code example:

String xml = new String("áéíóúñ");
byte[] latin1 = xml.getBytes("UTF-8");
byte[] utf8 = new String(latin1, "ISO-8859-1").getBytes("UTF-8");