Name: bb33257 Date: 10/26/99


Character Converter APIs
Add API for getting the list of available converters, and setting
and getting the default converter.

One of the biggest holes in the current API is the lack of ability
to programmatically control Charset Converters. (This has been a
thorn in the side of many developers!) While there was not enough
time to address this fully in 1.3, some small steps can be taken to
ameliorate the situation.

Currently, there is a simple API to convert into and out of charsets,
with two places where this API surfaces. In each of them, you use a
string to identify the non-Unicode character set that you are
converting to or from. You can attach an encoding to a stream:
OutputStreamWriter or InputStreamReader; or on String you specify
the encoding when constructing from an array of bytes, or when using
the getBytes method to convert to bytes.

There is no programmatic way to get a list of the supported
character sets, other than to delve into the sun directory in the
java source.

(Review ID: 97047)

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