Is Java UTF-8 Charset exception possible?

Question

Can Java possibly throw UnsupportedEncodingException when using "UTF-8" encoding, or I can safely suppress it's throwing?

Answer 1

As McDowell noted in a comment to templatetypdef's answer: If you use a Charset object when you instantiate a new String instead of passing the name of the charset, you don't have to deal with an UnsupportedEncodingException or any other checked exception:

byte[] bytes = ...;

// Requires you to handle UnsupportedEncodingException
String s1 = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");

// Doesn't require you to handle any checked exceptions
String s2 = new String(bytes, Charset.forName("UTF-8"));

It's an inconsistency in Java's standard library that we have to live with...

Note that Charset.forName(...) can throw exceptions (IllegalCharsetNameException, IllegalArgumentException, UnsupportedCharsetException), but these are all unchecked exceptions, so you don't have to catch or re-throw them yourself.

edit - Since Java 7 there's class java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets which has constants for frequently used character encodings. Example:

String s3 = new String(bytes, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);