Java I/O, NIO and NIO.2

Chapter    10

Charsets

In Chapter 5, I briefly introduced the concepts of character set and character encoding. I also referred to some of the types located in the java.nio.charset package. In this chapter, I expand on these topics and explore this package. I also discuss the part of the java.lang.String class that’s relevant to these topics.

A Brief Review of the Fundamentals

Java uses Unicode to represent characters. (Unicode is a 16-bit character set standard [actually, more of an encoding standard because some characters are represented by multiple numeric values; each value is known as a code point] whose goal is to map all of the world’s significant character sets into an all-encompassing map.) Although Unicode makes it much easier to work ...