[SOLVED] Apache Commons ToStringBuilder String encoding

Apache Commons ToStringBuilder String encoding

I'm using Apache Commons' ToStringBuilder to generate entities toString's block content. But for some entities, there are String fields encoded with "ISO-8859-15", so I'm wondering if the produced toString will use platform's default (UTF-8 on my vm) with values outputed incorrectly.

Thanks for your help

Solution

Java strings are always using Unicode for characters.

Encoding only becomes an issue when reading/writing strings from/to files. Or when converting strings into byte arrays for example.

In that sense: you do not have to worry about the string builder. You have to worry about "where are is the data initially coming from" respectively "going to".

Just for completeness: yes, the Java String class has a constructor where you can pass in the desired encoding - but that constructor also takes an array of bytes as first argument. And as said: in such cases you have to worry about encoding.