The current implementation of java.nio.Charset provides access to only a small subset of the character encodings that were supported by the java.io APIs. The test case:

import java.nio.Charset;
import java.util.Iterator;

public class GetAvailableCharsets {

    public static void main (String[] args) {
    
        Iterator charsetIterator = Charset.availableCharsets().keySet().iterator();
        while (charsetIterator.hasNext()) {
            String charsetName = (String) charsetIterator.next();
            Charset charset = Charset.forName(charsetName);
            System.out.println(charset.name() + " - " + charset.displayName());
        }
        // Big5 is both preferred MIME name and our old converter name
        Charset charset = Charset.forName("Big5");
        System.out.println(charset.name() + " - " + charset.displayName());
    }
}

produces the following output:

ISO-8859-1 - ISO-8859-1
ISO-8859-15 - ISO-8859-15
US-ASCII - US-ASCII
UTF-16 - UTF-16
UTF-16BE - UTF-16BE
UTF-16LE - UTF-16LE
UTF-8 - UTF-8
windows-1252 - windows-1252
Exception in thread "main" java.nio.UnsupportedCharsetException: Big5
        at java.nio.Charset.forName(Charset.java:329)
        at GetAvailableCharsets.main(GetAvailableCharsets.java:15)


The expected output would include all character encodings listed at
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/guide/intl/encoding.doc.html
and then repeat Big5.


ingrid.yao@Eng 2001-05-29

Merlin CAP member reports the same complain.