Special Edition Using Java 2 Standard Edition

Character Set Converters

Characters can be represented as binary numbers. This is normally referred to as an encoding scheme. The most common scheme used for English text is called the ISO Latin-1 encoding. The set of characters supported by any one encoding is said to be its character set, which includes all possible characters that can be represented by the encoding. Usually, the first 127 codes of an encoding correspond to the almost universally accepted ASCII character set, which includes all the standard characters and punctuation marks. Nevertheless, most encoding schemes can vary radically, especially because some, such as Chinese and Japanese encoding schemes, have character sets that bear little resemblance to the English set.

The SDK ...