String.getBytes(charset) has errors for EBCDIC-charset

Question

The String-conversion to EBCDIC via String.getBytes(charset) supplys at least one false result. The character "a" becomes a 0x3f but should be 0x81. ``` public static void convert() throws UnsupportedEncodingException { String data="abcABC"; String ebcdic = "IBM-1047"; String ascii = "ISO-8859-1"; System.out.printf("Charset %s is supported: %s
", ebcdic, Charset.isSupported(ebcdic)); String result= new String(data.getBytes(ebcdic)); System.out.printf("EBCDIC: %s
",asHex(result.getBytes())); System.out.printf("Charset %s is supported: %s
", ascii, Charset.isSupported(ascii)); result= new String(data.getBytes(ascii)); System.out.printf("ASCII: %s
",asHex(result.getBytes())); } public static String asHex(byte[] buf) { char[] HEX_CHARS = "0123456789abcdef".toCharArray(); char[] chars = new char[2 * buf.length]; for (int i = 0; i < buf.length; ++i) { chars[2 * i] = HEX_CHARS[(buf[i] & 0xF0) >>> 4]; chars[2 * i + 1] = HEX_CHARS[buf[i] & 0x0F]; } return new String(chars); } ``` The resul…

Accepted Answer

When you call

```
data.getBytes(ebcdic)
```

You are encoding the text in data into EBCDIC bytes. Then you create a string from these bytes as if they stood for some string in the default character encoding for your system: this causes breakage because the bytes don't have to encode valid text in any other encoding than EBCDIC.

To fix this, keep bytes as bytes:

```
byte[] result= data.getBytes(ebcdic);
System.out.printf("EBCDIC: %s
",asHex(result));
```

String.getBytes(charset) has errors for EBCDIC-charset

Solution

Problem