Java – String getBytes() Method example

The getBytes() method encodes a given String into a sequence of bytes and returns an array of bytes. The method can be used in below two ways:

public byte[] getBytes(String charsetName): It encodes the String into sequence of bytes using the specified charset and return the array of those bytes. It throws UnsupportedEncodingException – If the specified charset is not supported.
public byte[] getBytes(): It encodes the String using default charset method.

Example: getBytes() method

import java.io.*;
public class GetBytesExample{
   public static void main(String args[]){
       String str = new String("Hello");
       byte[] array1 = str.getBytes();
       System.out.print("Default Charset encoding:");
       for(byte b: array1){
           System.out.print(b);
       }
       System.out.print("\nUTF-16 Charset encoding:");
       try{
             byte [] array2 = str.getBytes("UTF-16");
             for(byte b1: array2){
                System.out.print(b1);
             }
             byte [] array3 = str.getBytes("UTF-16BE");
             System.out.print("\nUTF-16BE Charset encoding:");
             for(byte b2: array3){
                System.out.print(b2);
             }
        }catch(UnsupportedEncodingException ex){
             System.out.println("Unsupported character set"+ex);
        }
   }	
}

Output:

Default Charset encoding:72101108108111
UTF-16 Charset encoding:-2-10720101010801080111
UTF-16BE Charset encoding:0720101010801080111

In the above example we have done encoding using charset UTF -16 and UTF - 16BE, there are many other standard charset like:

• US-ASCII: Seven-bit ASCII, a.k.a. ISO646-US, a.k.a. the Basic Latin block of the Unicode character set
• ISO-8859-1: ISO Latin Alphabet No. 1, a.k.a. ISO-LATIN-1
• UTF-8: Eight-bit UCS Transformation Format
• UTF-16BE: Sixteen-bit UCS Transformation Format, big-endian byte order
• UTF-16LE: Sixteen-bit UCS Transformation Format, little-endian byte order
• UTF-16: Sixteen-bit UCS Transformation Format, byte order identified by an optional byte-order mark.

Reference:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/nio/charset/Charset.html