Check if a String contains encoded characters

Question

Hello I am looking for a way to detect if a string has being encoded

For example

    String name = "Hellä world";
    String encoded = new String(name.getBytes("utf-8"), "iso8859-1");

The output of this encoded variable is:

Hellä world

As you can see there is an A with grave and another symbol. Is there a way to check if the output contains encoded characters?

Answer 1

Sounds like you want to check if a string that was decoded from bytes in latin1 could have been decoded in UTF-8, too. That's easy because illegal byte sequences are replaced by the character \ufffd:

String recoded = new String(encoded.getBytes("iso-8859-1"), "UTF-8");
return recoded.indexOf('\uFFFD') == -1; // No replacement character found