Converting UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 in Java - how to keep it as single byte

Question

If you're dealing with character encodings other than UTF-16, you shouldn't be using java.lang.String or the char primitive -- you should only be using byte[] arrays or ByteBuffer objects. Then, you can use java.nio.charset.Charset to convert between encodings:

Charset utf8charset = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
Charset iso88591charset = Charset.forName("ISO-8859-1");

ByteBuffer inputBuffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(new byte[]{(byte)0xC3, (byte)0xA2});

// decode UTF-8
CharBuffer data = utf8charset.decode(inputBuffer);

// encode ISO-8559-1
ByteBuffer outputBuffer = iso88591charset.encode(data);
byte[] outputData = outputBuffer.array();

byte[] iso88591Data = theString.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");

Will do the trick. From your description it seems as if you're trying to "store an ISO-8859-1 String". String objects in Java are always implicitly encoded in UTF-16. There's no way to change that encoding.

What you can do, 'though is to get the bytes that constitute some other encoding of it (using the .getBytes() method as shown above).

Starting with a set of bytes which encode a string using UTF-8, creates a string from that data, then get some bytes encoding the string in a different encoding:

    byte[] utf8bytes = { (byte)0xc3, (byte)0xa2, 0x61, 0x62, 0x63, 0x64 };
    Charset utf8charset = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
    Charset iso88591charset = Charset.forName("ISO-8859-1");

    String string = new String ( utf8bytes, utf8charset );

    System.out.println(string);

    // "When I do a getbytes(encoding) and "
    byte[] iso88591bytes = string.getBytes(iso88591charset);

    for ( byte b : iso88591bytes )
        System.out.printf("%02x ", b);

    System.out.println();

    // "then create a new string with the bytes in ISO-8859-1 encoding"
    String string2 = new String ( iso88591bytes, iso88591charset );

    // "I get a two different chars"
    System.out.println(string2);

this outputs strings and the iso88591 bytes correctly:

âabcd 
e2 61 62 63 64 
âabcd

So your byte array wasn't paired with the correct encoding:

    String failString = new String ( utf8bytes, iso88591charset );

    System.out.println(failString);

Outputs

âabcd

(either that, or you just wrote the utf8 bytes to a file and read them elsewhere as iso88591)

This is what I needed:

public static byte[] encode(byte[] arr, String fromCharsetName) {
    return encode(arr, Charset.forName(fromCharsetName), Charset.forName("UTF-8"));
}

public static byte[] encode(byte[] arr, String fromCharsetName, String targetCharsetName) {
    return encode(arr, Charset.forName(fromCharsetName), Charset.forName(targetCharsetName));
}

public static byte[] encode(byte[] arr, Charset sourceCharset, Charset targetCharset) {

    ByteBuffer inputBuffer = ByteBuffer.wrap( arr );

    CharBuffer data = sourceCharset.decode(inputBuffer);

    ByteBuffer outputBuffer = targetCharset.encode(data);
    byte[] outputData = outputBuffer.array();

    return outputData;
}