Converting Between Strings (Unicode) and Other Character Set Encodings public static void main(String args[]) { // Create the encoder and decoder for ISO-8859-1 Charset charset = Charset.forName("ISO-8859-1"); CharsetDecoder decoder = charset.newDecoder(); CharsetEncoder encoder = charset.newEncoder(); try { // Convert a string to ISO-LATIN-1 bytes in a ByteBuffer // The new ByteBuffer is ready to be read. ByteBuffer bbuf = encoder.encode(CharBuffer.wrap("a string")); // Convert ISO-LATIN-1 bytes in a ByteBuffer to a character ByteBuffer and then to a string. // The new ByteBuffer is ready to be read. CharBuffer cbuf = decoder.decode(bbuf); String s = cbuf.toString(); System.out.println(s); } catch (CharacterCodingException e) { } }