in Java, which encoding scheme is 8-bit US ASCII?

Question

I want to write a string to a file which expects an 8-bit US ASCII encoding.

Which encoding scheme should I use for the method String.getBytes(encodingScheme)?

Thanks.

Answer 1

ASCII is a 7bit encoding scheme, there is no "8-bit ASCII".

However, many encodings are ASCII-compatible, and some are 8bit transparent (i.e. every binary series maps to a valid character string, and vice versa, useful if you're sending binary data over a character channel without encoding it in base64 or so). If you just want to be ASCII-compatible, UTF-8 is the best choice; if you need 8 bit transparency, ISO-8859-1.

Note that the above advice is only useful if you want to transport ASCII-only strings or 8bit binary ones. In most cases, you actually want to transfer arbitrary strings, and there's no way around finding the proper encoding for these.

Answer 2

US-ASCII

The list of encodings is here: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/intl/encoding.doc.html