Converting UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 in Java - how to ke

Question

I am trying to convert a string encoded in java in UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1. Say for example, in the string 'âabcd' 'â' is represented in ISO-8859-1 as E2. In UTF-8 it is represented as two bytes. C3 A2 I believe. When I do a getbytes(encoding) and then create a new string with the bytes in ISO-8859-1 encoding, I get a two different chars. â. Is there any other way to do this so as to keep the character the same i.e. âabcd?

Answer 1

In addition to Adam Rosenfield's answer, I would like to add that ByteBuffer.array() returns the buffer's underlying byte array, which is not necessarily "trimmed" up to the last character. Extra manipulation will be needed, such as the ones mentioned in this answer; in particular:

byte[] b = new byte[bb.remaining()]
bb.get(b);

Answer 2

For files encoding...

public class FRomUtf8ToIso {
        static File input = new File("C:/Users/admin/Desktop/pippo.txt");
        static File output = new File("C:/Users/admin/Desktop/ciccio.txt");


    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

        BufferedReader br = null;

        FileWriter fileWriter = new FileWriter(output);
        try {

            String sCurrentLine;

            br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader( input ));

            int i= 0;
            while ((sCurrentLine = br.readLine()) != null) {
                byte[] isoB =  encode( sCurrentLine.getBytes() );
                fileWriter.write(new String(isoB, Charset.forName("ISO-8859-15") ) );
                fileWriter.write("\n");
                System.out.println( i++ );
            }

        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } finally {
            try {
                fileWriter.flush();
                fileWriter.close();
                if (br != null)br.close();
            } catch (IOException ex) {
                ex.printStackTrace();
            }
        }

    }


    static byte[] encode(byte[] arr){
        Charset utf8charset = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
        Charset iso88591charset = Charset.forName("ISO-8859-15");

        ByteBuffer inputBuffer = ByteBuffer.wrap( arr );

        // decode UTF-8
        CharBuffer data = utf8charset.decode(inputBuffer);

        // encode ISO-8559-1
        ByteBuffer outputBuffer = iso88591charset.encode(data);
        byte[] outputData = outputBuffer.array();

        return outputData;
    }

}