how to convert chinese string to byte array and byte array to chinese string?

Question

I am programming converting chinese string to byte array and byte array to chinese string. I know when using UTF-8 encode, chinese string return 2 bytes. But It returns 3 bytes in my computer.

//test code

String result = System.getProperty("file.encoding"); // UTF-8

String temp = new String("中国");

byte[] bytes = temp.getBytes();  

Result:

bytes = {-28,-72,-83,-27,-101,-67}

But I don'k know well. Please help me. Thanks

Answer 1

I'm not sure where you're getting the assertion that Chinese characters are all 2 bytes in UTF-8.

中 is U+4E2D, and 国 is U+56FD. If you look at the summary of how many bytes each code point takes in UTF-8 , you'll see that code points between U+0800 and U+FFFF (inclusive) require 3 bytes. Both of the characters here fall in that range.

For instance, 中 (U+4E2D) encodes as 11100100 10111000 10101101 (you can play with UTF8-to-binary conversions here ), and those three bytes do in fact translate to -28, -72 and -83 in twos complement (you can play with decimal-to-two's complement here ).