From compilation to runtime, how does Java String encoding really work

Question

I recently realized that I don\'t fully understand Java\'s string encoding process.

Consider the following code:

public class Main
{
    public stati         


        

Answer 1

1. Source files can be in any encoding
2. You need to tell the compiler the encoding of source files (e.g. javac -encoding...); otherwise, platform encoding is assumed
3. In class file binaries, string literals are stored as (modified) UTF-8, but unless you work with bytecode, this doesn't matter (see JVM spec)
4. Strings in Java are UTF-16, always (see Java language spec)
5. The System.out PrintStream will transform your strings from UTF-16 to bytes in the system encoding prior to writing them to stdout

Notes:

• Blog post I wrote on Java encoding
• Don't use -Dfile.encoding