Recommended method for handling UnsupportedEncodingException from String.getBytes(“UTF-8”)

Question

What is the recommended way to handle an UnsupportedEncodingException when calling String.getBytes(\"UTF-8\") inside a library method?

If I\'m reading http://docs.orac

Answer 1

I ran across this question while trying to figure out if UTF-8 is always available. So thanks for the link.

I agree that there is no need to throw a checked exception when it comes to encoding and decoding using a specific character set that is guaranteed to be available. If the character set was a variable that was passed in, I would probably throw UnsupportedEncodingException.

This is what I am doing in a similar piece of Android code:

public static String encode(String input) {
    try {
        return URLEncoder.encode(input, CharEncoding.UTF_8);
    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
}

CharEncoding.UTF_8 is just Apache Commons' String constant for "UTF-8".

Judge Mental's suggestion to use StandardCharsets.UTF_8 is great but for those of us doing Android development, it's only available on SDK 19 (KitKat) and above.

Answer 2

If you use Lombok, @SneakyThrows annotation can be used to avoid this.

From Lombok documentation:

"@SneakyThrows can be used to sneakily throw checked exceptions without actually declaring this in your method's throws clause.

• An 'impossible' exception. For example, new String(someByteArray, "UTF-8"); declares that it can throw an UnsupportedEncodingException but according to the JVM specification, UTF-8 must always be available. An UnsupportedEncodingException here is about as likely as a ClassNotFoundError when you use a String object, and you don't catch those either! "

https://projectlombok.org/features/SneakyThrows

Answer 3

You know what I do?

return "blah".getBytes( Charset.forName( "UTF-8" ) );

This one doesn't throw a checked exception.

Update: Since Java 1.7, we have StandardCharsets.

return "blah".getBytes( StandardCharsets.UTF_8 );