What if my JRE doesn't support a character encoding?

Question

What if a file is generated using an encoding that my JRE doesn't support? Is there anyway to extend/customize what my JRE can handle?

This might be a terrible/irrelevant example (I'm just brushing up on character sets/encodings for the first time), but I believe the Linux JRE does not handle CP-1252 (a Windows encoding). If that's the case, then how can I get a Java app running on a Linux machine to read a CP-1252-encoded file?

Even if the Linux JRE distro does support CP-1252 (making that a horrible example), I know for a fact that there are encodings that it doesn't support. Whatever those encodings are, is there any way to extend its standard Charactset , and if so, how?

Answer 1

The Java class library has a mechanism for adding new character set support; see the javadocs for CharsetProvider .

The basic idea is that you write a class that implements the CharsetProvider API. Then in your JAR file you add a file called "/META-INF/services/java.nio.charset.spi.CharsetProvider" that lists your charset names, in a prescribed format.

_{(I also came across this bug report http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4619777 which might affect you if you are trying to add your own Charsets in a trusted applet ...)}

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Do you know of any "Charset Extension libraries" out there that already do this (and provide lots of non-standard charsets)?

The only example I could find is JCharset and it only adds 8 extra charsets.

If you (or anyone else) needs a charset that is not included, may I suggest that you download JCharset, implement the new charset and then post the changes to the author as patches.

Answer 2

The documentation says:

Support for new charsets can be made available via the interface defined in the CharsetProvider class in the java.nio.charset.spi package.

Follow the link and read the instructions...

Answer 3

sunilkumar from vmoksha

Please check your .xml file containg UTF-8