<!--
DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS FILE HEADER.
under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only, as
published by the Free Software Foundation. Oracle designates this
particular file as subject to the "Classpath" exception as provided
by Oracle in the LICENSE file that accompanied this code.
This code is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
version 2 for more details (a copy is included in the LICENSE file that
accompanied this code).
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License version
2 along with this work; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.
Please contact Oracle, 500 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA 94065 USA
or visit www.oracle.com if you need additional information or have any
questions.
-->
<!doctype html public "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
<html>
<body bgcolor="white">
Defines charsets, decoders, and encoders, for translating between bytes and
Unicode characters.
<blockquote><table cellspacing=1 cellpadding=0 summary="Summary of charsets, decoders, and encoders in this package">
<tr><th><p align="left">Class name</p></th><th><p align="left">Description</p></th></tr>
<td>A named mapping between characters<br>and bytes</td></tr>
<td>Decodes bytes into characters</td></tr>
<td>Encodes characters into bytes</td></tr>
<td>Describes coder results</td></tr>
<td>Describes actions to take when<br>coding errors are detected</td></tr>
</table></blockquote>
<p> A <i>charset</i> is named mapping between sequences of sixteen-bit Unicode
characters and sequences of bytes, in the sense defined in <a
<i>decoder</i> is an engine which transforms bytes in a specific charset into
characters, and an <i>encoder</i> is an engine which transforms characters into
bytes. Encoders and decoders operate on byte and character buffers. They are
collectively referred to as <i>coders</i>.
coders for a given charset and for retrieving the various names associated with
a charset. It also defines static methods for testing whether a particular
charset is supported, for locating charset instances by name, and for
constructing a map that contains every charset for which support is available
in the current Java virtual machine.
<p> Most users will not use these classes directly; instead they will use the
existing charset-related constructors and methods in the {@link
of whose implementations have been reworked to make use of the charset
facilities defined in this package. A small number of changes have been made
classes in order to allow explicit charset objects to be specified in the
construction of instances of those classes.
<p> Support for new charsets can be made available via the interface defined in
java.nio.charset.spi}</tt> package.
<p> Unless otherwise noted, passing a <tt>null</tt> argument to a constructor
or method in any class or interface in this package will cause a {@link
@since 1.4
@author Mark Reinhold
@author JSR-51 Expert Group
</body>
</html>