IanGabes / AlbiteCharacterDecoder

AlbiteStreamReader provides the ability to read characters from encodings, not supported natively supported by Java's InputStreamReader. It works in J2ME, too.

AlbiteStreamReader provides the ability to read characters from encodings, not supported natively supported by Java's InputStreamReader:

1. UTF-8,
2. ASCII,
3. ISO-8859-1,
4. ISO-8859-2,
5. ISO-8859-3,
6. ISO-8859-4,
7. ISO-8859-5,
8. ISO-8859-7,
9. ISO-8859-9,
10. ISO-8859-10,
11. ISO-8859-13,
12. ISO-8859-14,
13. ISO-8859-15,
14. ISO-8859-16,
15. WINDOWS-1250,
16. WINDOWS-1251,
17. WINDOWS-1252,
18. WINDOWS-1253,
19. WINDOWS-1254,
20. WINDOWS-1257,
21. KOI8-R,
22. KOI8-RU,
23. KOI8-U

Using the API is almost the same like the InputStreamReader, with a few exceptions:

• creating an AlbiteStreamReader can throw an IOException, because it may need to skip the BOM of a UTF-8 stream
• a list of supported encodings can be obtained using Encodings.ENCODINGS
• most encodings have name aliases, see the Encodings interface
• all unknown characters are converted to question marks (if one needs different functionality, it would be not too hard to implement it themselves
• the encoding of the reader my be changed after it has been created (useful for reading xml files for example)

Here is an example of its usage, extracted from the test class:

{
	/*
	 * Read the original file
	 */
	AlbiteStreamReader reader =
			new AlbiteStreamReader(origStream, encoding);

	int read;

	while ((read = reader.read()) != -1) {
		originalBuffer.append((char) read);
	}
}

{
	/*
	 * Now, read the utf-8 file, using the official java reader
	 */
	InputStreamReader reader =
			new InputStreamReader(utf8Stream, "utf-8");

	int read;

	while((read = reader.read()) != -1) {
		utf8Buffer.append((char) read);
	}
}

If one would like to check whether an encoding is supported by the reader, one could do that:

boolean supported = AlbiteStreamReader.encodingSupported(encoding);

One can change the encoding at any time. If the encoding is not supported, a UnsupportedEncodingException would be thrown, and the reader would continue to use its current encoding.

{
	AlbiteStreamReader reader =
			new AlbiteStreamReader(origStream, "utf-8");

	try {
		reader.setEncoding("iso-8859-1");
	} catch(UnsupportedEncodingException e) {}
}

One can also get the current encoding of the reader:

{
	AlbiteStreamReader reader =
			new AlbiteStreamReader(origStream, "utf-8");
	
	System.out.println(reader.getEncoding());
}

The code is based on some code from libiconv.