Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Name

Charset

Synopsis

A Charset represents a character set or encoding. Each Charset has a cannonical name, returned by name( ) , and a set of aliases, returned by aliases( ) . You can look up a Charset by name or alias with the static Charset.forName( ) method, which throws an UnsupportedCharsetException if the named charset is not installed on the system. In Java 5.0, you can obtain the default Charset used by the Java VM with the static defaultCharset( ) method. Check whether a charset specified by name or alias is supported with the static isSupported( ) . Obtain the complete set of installed charsets with availableCharsets( ) which returns a sorted map from canonical names to Charset objects. Note that charset names are not case-sensitive, and you can use any capitialization for charset names you pass to isSupported( ) and forName( ). Note that there are a number of classes and methods in the Java platform that specify charsets by name rather than by Charset object. See, for example, java.io.InputStreamReader, java.io.OutputStreamWriter, String.getBytes( ), and java.nio.channels.Channels.newWriter( ). When working with classes and methods such as these, there is no need to use a Charset object.

All implementations of Java are required to support at least the following 6 charsets:

Canonical name	Description
US-ASCII	seven-bit ASCII
ISO-8859-1	The 8-bit superset of ASCII which includes the characters used in most Western-European languages. Also known as ISO-LATIN-1.