Isn’t the size of character in Java 2 bytes?

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A char represents a character in Java (*). It is 2 bytes large (or 16 bits).

That doesn’t necessarily mean that every representation of a character is 2 bytes long. In fact many character encodings only reserve 1 byte for every character (or use 1 byte for the most common characters).

When you call the String(byte[]) constructor you ask Java to convert the byte[] to a String using the platform’s default charset. Since the platform default charset is usually a 1-byte encoding such as ISO-8859-1 or a variable-length encoding such as UTF-8, it can easily convert that 1 byte to a single character.

If you run that code on a platform that uses UTF-16 (or UTF-32 or UCS-2 or UCS-4 or …) as the platform default encoding, then you will not get a valid result (you’ll get a String containing the Unicode Replacement Character instead).

That’s one of the reasons why you should not depend on the platform default encoding: when converting between byte[] and char[]/String or between InputStream and Reader or between OutputStream and Writer, you should always specify which encoding you want to use. If you don’t, then your code will be platform-dependent.

(*) that’s not entirely true: a char represents a UTF-16 code unit. Either one or two UTF-16 code units represent a Unicode code point. A Unicode code point usually represents a character, but sometimes multiple Unicode code points are used to make up a single character. But the approximation above is close enough to discuss the topic at hand.

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