Recommended method for handling UnsupportedEncodingException from String.getBytes("UTF-8")

Question

What is the recommended way to handle an UnsupportedEncodingException when calling String.getBytes("UTF-8") inside a library method?

If I'm reading http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/intl/encoding.doc.html correctly, UTF-8 encoding should always be available, which leads me to believe there's no reason to pass this exception on to the library's consumer (that is, add a throws clause to the method signature). It seems any failure mode that made UTF-8 encoding facilities unavailable would be catastrophic, leading me to write this handler:

    try
    {
        ....
        return "blah".getBytes("UTF-8");
    }
    catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e)
    {
        // we're assuming UTF-8 encoding is always available.
        // see
        // http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/intl/encoding.doc.html
        e.printStackTrace();
        return null; //prevent compile-time "method must return a result" errors
    }

Is there a failure mode that wouldn't be addressed by this snippet?

Answer 1

You know what I do?

return "blah".getBytes( Charset.forName( "UTF-8" ) );

This one doesn't throw a checked exception.

Update: Since Java 1.7, we have StandardCharsets.

return "blah".getBytes( StandardCharsets.UTF_8 );