Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Also,ISO/IEC8859-2(alsoknownasLatin-2)definesasimilarcharacterset/encod-
ing covering Central and Eastern European countries.
DespiteISO's/IEC'sbestefforts,aplethoraofcharacter sets/encodingsisstillinad-
equate. For example, most character sets/encodings only allow you to create docu-
mentsinacombinationofEnglishandoneotherlanguage(orasmallnumberofother
languages).Youcannot,forexample,useanISO/IECcharacterset/encodingtocre-
ateadocumentusingacombinationofEnglish,French,Turkish,Russian,andGreek
characters.
This andotherproblems arebeingaddressed byaninternational effortthat hascre-
atedandiscontinuingtodevelop
Unicode
,asingleuniversalcharacterset.Because
UnicodecharactersaretwiceasbigasISO/IECcharacters,Unicodeusesoneofsev-
eral variable-length encoding schemes known as
Unicode Transformation Format
(UTF)
to encode Unicode characters for efficiency. For example, UTF-8 encodes
every character in the Unicode character set in one to four bytes (and is backward
compatible with ASCII).
Theterms
character set
and
character encoding
areoftenusedinterchangeably.They
meanthesamethinginthecontextofISO/IECcharactersets,whereacodepointis
the encoding. However, these terms are different in the context of Unicode, where
UnicodeisthecharactersetandUTF-8isoneofseveralpossiblecharacterencodings
for Unicode characters.
Writer and Reader Classes Overview
The
java.io
packageprovidesseveralwriterandreaderclassesthataredescendents
classes.
