Representing char as a byte in Java

Question

I must convert a char into a byte or a byte array. In other languages I know that a char is just a single byte. However, looking at the Java Character class, its min value is \u0000 and its max value is \uFFFF. This makes it seem like a char is 2 bytes long.

Will I be able to store it as a byte or do I need to store it as two bytes?

Before anyone asks, I will say that I'm trying to do this because I'm working under an interface that expects my results to be a byte array. So I have to convert my char to one.

Please let me know and help me understand this.

Thanks, jbu

Answer 1

To convert characters to bytes, you need to specify a character encoding. Some character encodings use one byte per character, while others use two or more bytes. In fact, for many languages, there are far too many characters to encode with a single byte.

In Java, the simplest way to convert from characters to bytes is with the String class's getBytes(Charset) method. (The StandardCharsets class defines some common encodings.) However, this method will silently replace characters with � if the character cannot be mapped under the specified encoding. If you need more control, you can configure a CharsetEncoder to handle this case with an error or use a different replacement character.