Chapter 3 Utils methods

thomas.b · #1 (**permalink**) September 11th, 2009, 07:05 PM

Thanks for the great book. After spending fruitless hours with cryptic (pun intended) JCE documentation, your book makes JCE concepts crystal clear.

Chapter 3 gives a utility class for byte->string->byte conversions, however:

Code:

// where s is a UTF-8 string 
chapter3.Utils.toString(chapter3.Utils.toByteArray(s));

mangles non-ascii characters where as

Code:

new String(s.getBytes());

returns the original string s as expected. Can you please explain?

thanks
tom

dgh · #2 (**permalink**) September 11th, 2009, 11:54 PM

The method guarantees that the string is converted on the basis that it's 8 bit ascii, so yes, it wouldn't work for UTF-8.

The reason behind it was to avoid issues with the examples that were related to getBytes(), the default conversion is platform dependent, and not all platforms support the same byte encodings.

Regards,

David

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