If I convert a character to byte and then back to char, that character mysteriously disappears and becomes something else. How is this possible?
This is the code:
char a = 'È'; // line 1
byte b = (byte)a; // line 2
char c = (char)b; // line 3
System.out.println((char)c + " " + (int)c);
Until line 2 everything is fine:
In line 1 I could print "a" in the console and it would show "È".
In line 2 I could print "b" in the console and it would show -56, that is 200 because byte is signed. And 200 is "È". So it's still fine.
But what's wrong in line 3? "c" becomes something else and the program prints ? 65480. That's something completely different.
What I should write in line 3 in order to get the correct result?
A character in Java is a Unicode code-unit which is treated as an unsigned number. So if you perform c = (char)b the value you get is 2^16 - 56 or 65536 - 56.
Or more precisely, the byte is first converted to a signed integer with the value 0xFFFFFFC8 using sign extension in a widening conversion. This in turn is then narrowed down to 0xFFC8 when casting to a char, which translates to the positive number 65480.
From the language specification:
5.1.4. Widening and Narrowing Primitive Conversion
First, the byte is converted to an int via widening primitive conversion (§5.1.2), and then the resulting int is converted to a char by narrowing primitive conversion (§5.1.3).
To get the right point use char c = (char) (b & 0xFF) which first converts the byte value of b to the positive integer 200 by using a mask, zeroing the top 24 bits after conversion: 0xFFFFFFC8 becomes 0x000000C8 or the positive number 200 in decimals.
Above is a direct explanation of what happens during conversion between the byte, int and char primitive types.
If you want to encode/decode characters from bytes, use Charset, CharsetEncoder, CharsetDecoder or one of the convenience methods such as new String(byte[] bytes, Charset charset) or String#toBytes(Charset charset). You can get the character set (such as UTF-8 or Windows-1252) from StandardCharsets.
new String(byteArray, Charset.defaultCharset())
This will convert a byte array to the default charset in java. It may throw exceptions depending on what you supply with the byteArray.
Source: Stackoverflow.com