UTF-16 to ASCII conversion in Java

Question

Having ignored it all this time, I am currently forcing myself to learn more about unicode in Java. There is an exercise I need to do about converting a UTF-16 string to 8-bit ASCII. Can someone please enlighten me how to do this in Java? I understand that you can't represent all possible unicode values in ASCII, so in this case I want a code which exceeds 0xFF to be merely added anyway (bad data should also just be added silently).

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use java.nio for an easy solution:

// first encode the utf-16 string as a ByteBuffer
ByteBuffer bb = Charset.forName("utf-16").encode(CharBuffer.wrap(utf16str));
// then decode those bytes as US-ASCII
CharBuffer ascii = Charset.forName("US-ASCII").decode(bb);