Converting UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 in Java - how to keep it as single byte

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?

Solution 1:

If you're dealing with character encodings other than UTF-16, you shouldn't be using java.lang.String or the char primitive -- you should only be using byte[] arrays or ByteBuffer objects. Then, you can use java.nio.charset.Charset to convert between encodings:

Charset utf8charset = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
Charset iso88591charset = Charset.forName("ISO-8859-1");

ByteBuffer inputBuffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(new byte[]{(byte)0xC3, (byte)0xA2});

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

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

Solution 2:

byte[] iso88591Data = theString.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");

Will do the trick. From your description it seems as if you're trying to "store an ISO-8859-1 String". String objects in Java are always implicitly encoded in UTF-16. There's no way to change that encoding.

What you can do, 'though is to get the bytes that constitute some other encoding of it (using the .getBytes() method as shown above).

Solution 3:

Starting with a set of bytes which encode a string using UTF-8, creates a string from that data, then get some bytes encoding the string in a different encoding:

    byte[] utf8bytes = { (byte)0xc3, (byte)0xa2, 0x61, 0x62, 0x63, 0x64 };
    Charset utf8charset = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
    Charset iso88591charset = Charset.forName("ISO-8859-1");

    String string = new String ( utf8bytes, utf8charset );

    System.out.println(string);

    // "When I do a getbytes(encoding) and "
    byte[] iso88591bytes = string.getBytes(iso88591charset);

    for ( byte b : iso88591bytes )
        System.out.printf("%02x ", b);

    System.out.println();

    // "then create a new string with the bytes in ISO-8859-1 encoding"
    String string2 = new String ( iso88591bytes, iso88591charset );

    // "I get a two different chars"
    System.out.println(string2);

this outputs strings and the iso88591 bytes correctly:

âabcd 
e2 61 62 63 64 
âabcd

So your byte array wasn't paired with the correct encoding:

    String failString = new String ( utf8bytes, iso88591charset );

    System.out.println(failString);

Outputs

âabcd

(either that, or you just wrote the utf8 bytes to a file and read them elsewhere as iso88591)

Solution 4:

This is what I needed:

public static byte[] encode(byte[] arr, String fromCharsetName) {
    return encode(arr, Charset.forName(fromCharsetName), Charset.forName("UTF-8"));
}

public static byte[] encode(byte[] arr, String fromCharsetName, String targetCharsetName) {
    return encode(arr, Charset.forName(fromCharsetName), Charset.forName(targetCharsetName));
}

public static byte[] encode(byte[] arr, Charset sourceCharset, Charset targetCharset) {

    ByteBuffer inputBuffer = ByteBuffer.wrap( arr );

    CharBuffer data = sourceCharset.decode(inputBuffer);

    ByteBuffer outputBuffer = targetCharset.encode(data);
    byte[] outputData = outputBuffer.array();

    return outputData;
}