How do I convert a string to UTF-8 in Java?
In order to convert a String into UTF-8, we use the getBytes() method in Java. The getBytes() method encodes a String into a sequence of bytes and returns a byte array. where charsetName is the specific charset by which the String is encoded into an array of bytes.
Table of Contents
Is Java a UTF-8 string?
String objects in Java are encoded in UTF-16. Java Platform is required to support other character encodings or charsets such as US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, and UTF-8. Errors may occur when converting between differently coded character data.

How do I encode a string in Java?
In this section, we will learn how to encode a string in Java.
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Using StandardCharsets Class
- String str = ” Tschüss”;
- ByteBuffer buffer = StandardCharsets. UTF_8. encode(str);
- String encoded_String = StandardCharsets. UTF_8. decode(buffer). toString(); assertEquals(str, encoded_String);
What is a UTF-8 string?
UTF-8 is an encoding system for Unicode. It can translate any Unicode character to a matching unique binary string, and can also translate the binary string back to a Unicode character. This is the meaning of “UTF”, or “Unicode Transformation Format.”

What is UTF-8 in Java?
UTF-8 is a variable width character encoding. UTF-8 has the ability to be as condensed as ASCII but can also contain any Unicode characters with some increase in the size of the file. UTF stands for Unicode Transformation Format. The ‘8’ signifies that it allocates 8-bit blocks to denote a character.
How do I change the encoding to UTF-8?
UTF-8 Encoding in Notepad (Windows)
Click File in the top-left corner of your screen. In the dialog which appears, select the following options: In the “Save as type” drop-down, select All Files. In the “Encoding” drop-down, select UTF-8.
Does Java use UTF-8 or UTF-16?
The native character encoding of the Java programming language is UTF-16. A charset in the Java platform therefore defines a mapping between sequences of sixteen-bit UTF-16 code units (that is, sequences of chars) and sequences of bytes.
How do I check if a string is valid UTF-8?
Valid UTF8 has a specific binary format. If it’s a single byte UTF8 character, then it is always of form ‘0xxxxxxx’, where ‘x’ is any binary digit. If it’s a two byte UTF8 character, then it’s always of form ‘110xxxxx10xxxxxx’.
Why is Java UTF-16?
Because it used to be UCS-2, which was a nice fixed-length 16-bits. Of course, 16bit turned out not to be enough. They retrofitted UTF-16 in on top. Here is a quote from the Unicode FAQ: Originally, Unicode was designed as a pure 16-bit encoding, aimed at representing all modern scripts.
Is UTF-8 and Unicode the same?
The Difference Between Unicode and UTF-8
Unicode is a character set. UTF-8 is encoding. Unicode is a list of characters with unique decimal numbers (code points).
Should I use UTF-8 or UTF-16?
UTF-16 is, obviously, more efficient for A) characters for which UTF-16 requires fewer bytes to encode than does UTF-8. UTF-8 is, obviously, more efficient for B) characters for which UTF-8 requires fewer bytes to encode than does UTF-16.
What is better than UTF-8?
UTF-16 is better where ASCII is not predominant, since it uses 2 bytes per character, primarily. UTF-8 will start to use 3 or more bytes for the higher order characters where UTF-16 remains at just 2 bytes for most characters. UTF-32 will cover all possible characters in 4 bytes.
How do you decode a string in Java?
Decode Basic Base 64 format to String
decode(encodedString); String actualString= new String(actualByte); Explanation: In above code we called Base64. Decoder using getDecoder() and then decoded the string passed in decode() method as parameter then convert return value to string.
What encoding does Java use?
UTF-16
The native character encoding of the Java programming language is UTF-16. A charset in the Java platform therefore defines a mapping between sequences of sixteen-bit UTF-16 code units (that is, sequences of chars) and sequences of bytes.
How do I know if a string is encoded?
In PHP, mb_detect_encoding() is used to detect the character encoding. It can detect the character encoding for a string from an ordered list of candidates. This function is supported in PHP 4.0. 6 or higher version.
What is UTF-8 encoding used for?
UTF-8 is the most widely used way to represent Unicode text in web pages, and you should always use UTF-8 when creating your web pages and databases. But, in principle, UTF-8 is only one of the possible ways of encoding Unicode characters.
How do I encode a text file in UTF-8?
- Step 1- Open the file in Microsoft Word.
- Step 2- Navigate to File > Save As.
- Step 3- Select Plain Text.
- Step 4- Choose UTF-8 Encoding.
How do you decode an encoded string?
So first, write the very first character of the encoded string and remove it from the encoded string then start adding the first character of the encoded string first to the left and then to the right of the decoded string and do this task repeatedly till the encoded string becomes empty.
What is encoding and decoding in Java?
Encoding and decoding in Java is a method of representing data in a different format to efficiently transfer information through a network or the web. The encoder converts data into a web representation. Once received, the decoder converts the web representation data into its original format.
Is Java a UTF-16 String?
Java uses UTF-16 for the internal text representation and supports a non-standard modification of UTF-8 for string serialization.
How do I know my encoding type?
An encoding sniffed by looking at the first few bytes of the file. If an encoding is detected at this stage, it will be one of the UTF-* encodings, EBCDIC, or ASCII. An encoding sniffed by the chardet library, if you have it installed. UTF-8.
The output is the encoding name for example:
- iso-8859-1.
- us-ascii.
- utf-8.
How do you decode a string?
Decode String in C++
The rule for encoding is: k[encoded_string], this indicates where the encoded_string inside the square brackets is being repeated exactly k times. We can assume that the original data does not contain any numeric characters and that digits are only for those repeat numbers, k.
What is default encoding in Java?
encoding attribute, Java uses “UTF-8” character encoding by default. Character encoding basically interprets a sequence of bytes into a string of specific characters.
Is UTF-8 same as ASCII?
For characters represented by the 7-bit ASCII character codes, the UTF-8 representation is exactly equivalent to ASCII, allowing transparent round trip migration. Other Unicode characters are represented in UTF-8 by sequences of up to 6 bytes, though most Western European characters require only 2 bytes3.
Are .txt files UTF-8?
Most Microsoft Windows text files use “ANSI”, “OEM”, “Unicode” or “UTF-8” encoding.
How do you check whether the string is encoded or not?
So you can test if the string contains a colon, if not, urldecode it, and if that string contains a colon, the original string was url encoded, if not, check if the strings are different and if so, urldecode again and if not, it is not a valid URI.
Why do we need encoding?
The purpose of encoding is to transform data so that it can be properly (and safely) consumed by a different type of system, e.g. binary data being sent over email, or viewing special characters on a web page. The goal is not to keep information secret, but rather to ensure that it’s able to be properly consumed.
How can I tell if a text file is UTF-8?
To verify if a file passes an encoding such as ascii, iso-8859-1, utf-8 or whatever then a good solution is to use the ‘iconv’ command.