Develop Reference

Which encoding for ProcessBuilder parameters

Using ProcessBuilder, I need to be able to send non-ASCII parameters to another Java program.
In this case, a program Abc needs to send e.g. Arabic characters to Def program through the parameters. I have control of Abc code, but not of Def.
Using the normal way of ProcessBuilder without any playing with the encoding, it was mentioned here, it is not possible. Def recieves question marks "?????".
However, I am able to get some result, but different encodings can be used for different scenarios.
E.g. I am trying all encodings to send to the recipient, and comparing the result of what is expected.
Windows, IntelliJ console:
Default charset: UTF-8
Found charsets: windows-1252, windows-1254 and windows-1258
Windows, command prompt:
Default charset: windows-1252
Found charsets: CESU-8 and UTF-8
Ubuntu, command prompt:
Default charset: ISO-8859-1
Found charsets: ISO-2022-CN, ISO-2022-KR, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15, ISO-8859-9, x-IBM1129, x-ISO-2022-CN-CNS and x-ISO-2022-CN-GB
My question is: how to programmatically know which correct encoding to use, since I need to have something universal?
In other words, what is the relation between the default charset and the found ones?
public class Abc {
private static final Path PATH = Paths.get("."); // With maven: ./target/classes
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
var string = "hello أحمد";
var bytes = string.getBytes();
System.out.println("Original string: " + string);
System.out.println("Default charset: " + Charset.defaultCharset());
for (var c : Charset.availableCharsets().values()) {
var newString = new String(bytes, c);
var process = new ProcessBuilder().command("java", "-cp",
PATH.toAbsolutePath().toString(),
"Def", newString).start();
process.waitFor();
var output = asString(process.getInputStream());
if (output.contains(string)) {
System.out.println("Found " + c + " " + output);
}
}
}
private static String asString(InputStream is) throws IOException {
try (var reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is))) {
var builder = new StringBuilder();
String line;
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
if (builder.length() != 0) {
builder.append(System.lineSeparator());
}
builder.append(line);
}
return builder.toString();
}
}
}
public class Def {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(args[0]);
}
}

Under the hood, what's actually being passed around is bytes, not chars. Normally, you'd expect the java method that ends up turning characters into bytes to have an overload that lets you specify charset, but, for whatever reason, it does not exist here.
How it should work is thusly:
You pass a string to ProcessBuilder
PB will turn that string into bytes using Charset.defaultCharset() (why? Because PB is all about making the OS do things, and the default charset reflects the OS's preferred charset).
These bytes are then fed to the process.
The process starts up. If it is java, and we're talking the args in psv main(String[] args), the same is done in reverse: Java takes the bytes and turns them back to characters via Charset.defaultCharset(), again.
This does show an immediate issue: If the default charset is not capable of representing a certain character, then in theory you are out of luck.
That would strongly suggest that using java to fire up java.exe should ordinarily mean you can pass whatever you want (unless the characters involved aren't representable in the system's charset).
Your code is odd. In particular, this line is the problem:
var bytes = string.getBytes();
This is short for string.getBytes(Charset.defaultCharset()). So now you have your bytes in the provided charset.
var newString = new String(bytes, c);
and now you're taking those bytes and turning them into a string using a completely different charset. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish with this. Pure gobbledygook would come out.
In other words, what is the relation between the default charset and the found ones?
What do you mean by 'found ones'? The string "Found charsets" appears nowhere in your code. If you mean: What Charset.availableCharsets() returns - there is no relationship at all. availableCharsets isn't relevant for ProcessBuilder.

One possibility is to convert your String to Unicode sequences string and then pass it to another process and there convert it back to a regular String. String of Unicode sequences will always contain ASCI characters only. Here is how it may look like:
String encoded = StringUnicodeEncoderDecoder.encodeStringToUnicodeSequence("hello أحمد"));
The result will be that String encode will hold this value:
"\u0068\u0065\u006c\u006c\u006f\u0020\u0623\u062d\u0645\u062f"
This String you can safely pass to another process. In that other process, you can do the following:
String originalString = StringUnicodeEncoderDecoder.decodeUnicodeSequenceToString(encodedString);
And the result will be that originalString will now hold this value:
"hello أحمد"
Class StringUnicodeEncoderDecoder could be found in an Open Source library called MgntUtils. You can get this library as Maven Artifact or get it on Github (including source code and JavaDoc). JavaDoc online is available here
This library and this particular feature is used and well tested by multiple users.
Disclamer: This library is written by me

Java GZip makes small differences when compressing file and decompressing it again

After a week of work I designed a binary file format, and made a Java reader for it. It's just an experiment, which works fine, unless I'm using the GZip compression function.
I called my binary type MBDF (Minimal Binary Database Format), and it can store 8 different types:
Integer (There is nothing like a byte, short, long or anything like that, since it is stored in flexible space (bigger numbers take more space))
Float-32 (32-bits floating point format, like java's float type)
Float-64 (64-bits floating point format, like java's double type)
String (A string in UTF-16 format)
Boolean
Null (Just specifies a null value)
Array (Something like java's ArrayList<Object>)
Compound (A String - Object map)
I used this data as test data:
COMPOUND {
float1: FLOAT_32 3.3
bool2: BOOLEAN true
float2: FLOAT_64 3.3
int1: INTEGER 3
compound1: COMPOUND {
xml: STRING "two length compound"
int: INTEGER 23
}
string1: STRING "Hello world!"
string2: STRING "3"
arr1: ARRAY [
STRING "Hello world!"
INTEGER 3
STRING "3"
FLOAT_32 3.29
FLOAT_64 249.2992
BOOLEAN true
COMPOUND {
str: STRING "one length compound"
}
BOOLEAN false
NULL null
]
bool1: BOOLEAN false
null1: NULL null
}
The xml key in a compound does matter!!
I made a file from it using this java code:
MBDFFile.writeMBDFToFile(
"/Users/<anonymous>/Documents/Java/MBDF/resources/file.mbdf",
b.makeMBDF(false)
);
Here, the variable b is a MBDFBinary object, containing all the data given above. With the makeMBDF function it generates the ISO 8859-1 encoded string and if the given boolean is true, it compresses the string using GZip. Then, when writing, an extra information character is added at the beginning of the file, containing information about how to read it back.
Then, after writing the file, I read it back into java and parse it
MBDF mbdf = MBDFFile.readMBDFFromFile("/Users/<anonymous>/Documents/Java/MBDF/resources/file.mbdf");
System.out.println(mbdf.getBinaryObject().parse());
This prints exactly the information mentioned above.
Then I try to use compression:
MBDFFile.writeMBDFToFile(
"/Users/<anonymous>/Documents/Java/MBDF/resources/file.mbdf",
b.makeMBDF(true)
);
I do exactly the same to read it back as I did with the uncompressed file, which should work. It prints this information:
COMPOUND {
float1: FLOAT_32 3.3
bool2: BOOLEAN true
float2: FLOAT_64 3.3
int1: INTEGER 3
compound1: COMPOUND {
xUT: STRING 'two length compound'
int: INTEGER 23
}
string1: STRING 'Hello world!'
string2: STRING '3'
arr1: ARRAY [
STRING 'Hello world!'
INTEGER 3
STRING '3'
FLOAT_32 3.29
FLOAT_64 249.2992
BOOLEAN true
COMPOUND {
str: STRING 'one length compound'
}
BOOLEAN false
NULL null
]
bool1: BOOLEAN false
null1: NULL null
}
Comparing it to the initial information, the name xml changed into xUT for some reason...
After some research I found little differences in binary data between before the compression and after the compression. Such patterns as 110011 change into 101010.
When I make the name xml longer, like xmldm, it is just parsed as xmldm for some reason.
I currently saw the problem only occur on names with three characters.
Directly compressing and decompressing the generated string (without saving it to a file and reading that) does work, so maybe the bug is caused by the file encoding.
As far as I know, the string output is in ISO 8859-1 format, but I couldn't get the file encoding right. When a file is read, it is read as it has to be read, and all the characters are read as ISO 8859-1 characters.
I've some things that could be a reason, I actually don't know how to test them:
The GZip output has a different encoding than the uncompressed encoding, causing small differences while storing as a file.
The file is stored as UTF-8 format, just ignoring the order to be ISO 8859-1 encoding ( don't know how to explain :) )
There is a little bug in the java GZip libraries.
But which one is true, and if none of them is right, what is the true reason for this bug?
I couldn't figure it out right now.
The MBDFFile class, reading and storing the files:
/* MBDFFile.java */
package com.redgalaxy.mbdf;
import java.io.*;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Path;
import java.nio.file.Paths;
public class MBDFFile {
public static MBDF readMBDFFromFile(String filename) throws IOException {
// FileInputStream is = new FileInputStream(filename);
// InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(is, "ISO-8859-1");
// BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(isr);
//
// StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
//
// String currentLine;
//
// while ((currentLine = br.readLine()) != null) {
// builder.append(currentLine);
// builder.append("\n");
// }
//
// builder.deleteCharAt(builder.length() - 1);
//
//
// br.close();
Path path = Paths.get(filename);
byte[] data = Files.readAllBytes(path);
return new MBDF(new String(data, "ISO-8859-1"));
}
private static void writeToFile(String filename, byte[] txt) throws IOException {
// BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(filename));
//// FileWriter writer = new FileWriter(filename);
// writer.write(txt.getBytes("ISO-8859-1"));
// writer.close();
// PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(filename, "ISO-8859-1");
FileOutputStream stream = new FileOutputStream(filename);
stream.write(txt);
stream.close();
}
public static void writeMBDFToFile(String filename, MBDF info) throws IOException {
writeToFile(filename, info.pack().getBytes("ISO-8859-1"));
}
}
The pack function generates the final string for the file, in ISO 8859-1 format.
For all the other code, see my MBDF Github repository.
I commented the code I've tried, trying to show what I tried.
My workspace:
- Macbook Air '11 (High Sierra)
- IntellIJ Community 2017.3
- JDK 1.8
I hope this is enough information, this is actually the only way to make clear what I'm doing, and what exactly isn't working.
Edit: MBDF.java
/* MBDF.java */
package com.redgalaxy.mbdf;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
public class MBDF {
private String data;
private InfoTag tag;
public MBDF(String data) {
this.tag = new InfoTag((byte) data.charAt(0));
this.data = data.substring(1);
}
public MBDF(String data, InfoTag tag) {
this.tag = tag;
this.data = data;
}
public MBDFBinary getBinaryObject() throws IOException {
String uncompressed = data;
if (tag.isCompressed) {
uncompressed = GZipUtils.decompress(data);
}
Binary binary = getBinaryFrom8Bit(uncompressed);
return new MBDFBinary(binary.subBit(0, binary.getLen() - tag.trailing));
}
public static Binary getBinaryFrom8Bit(String s8bit) {
try {
byte[] bytes = s8bit.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
return new Binary(bytes, bytes.length * 8);
} catch( UnsupportedEncodingException ignored ) {
// This is not gonna happen because encoding 'ISO-8859-1' is always supported.
return new Binary(new byte[0], 0);
}
}
public static String get8BitFromBinary(Binary binary) {
try {
return new String(binary.getByteArray(), "ISO-8859-1");
} catch( UnsupportedEncodingException ignored ) {
// This is not gonna happen because encoding 'ISO-8859-1' is always supported.
return "";
}
}
/*
* Adds leading zeroes to the binary string, so that the final amount of bits is 16
*/
private static String addLeadingZeroes(String bin, boolean is16) {
int len = bin.length();
long amount = (long) (is16 ? 16 : 8) - len;
// Create zeroes and append binary string
StringBuilder zeroes = new StringBuilder();
for( int i = 0; i < amount; i ++ ) {
zeroes.append(0);
}
zeroes.append(bin);
return zeroes.toString();
}
public String pack(){
return tag.getFilePrefixChar() + data;
}
public String getData() {
return data;
}
public InfoTag getTag() {
return tag;
}
}
This class contains the pack() method. data is already compressed here (if it should be).
For other classes, please watch the Github repository, I don't want to make my question too long.

Solved it by myself!
It seemed to be the reading and writing system. When I exported a file, I made a string using the ISO-8859-1 table to turn bytes into characters. I wrote that string to a text file, which is UTF-8. The big problem was that I used FileWriter instances to write it, which are for text files.
Reading used the inverse system. The complete file was read into memory as a string (memory consuming!!) and was then being decoded.
I didn't know a file was binary data, where specific formats of them form text data. ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 are some of those formats. I had problems with UTF-8, because it splitted some characters into two bytes, which I couldn't manage...
My solution to it was to use streams. There exist FileInputStreams and FileOutputStreams in Java, which could be used for reading and writing binary files. I didn't use the streams, as I thought there was no big difference ("files are text, so what's the problem?"), but there is... I implemented this (by writing a new similar library) and I'm now able to pass every input stream to the decoder and every output stream to the encoder. To make uncompressed files, you need to pass a FileOutputStream. GZipped files could use GZipOutputStreams, relying on a FileOutputStream. If someone wants a string with the binary data, a ByteArrayOutputStream could be used. Same rules apply to reading, where the InputStream variant of the mentioned streams should be used.
No UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 problems anymore, and it seemed to work, even with GZip!

Check whether data can be represented in a specified encoding

I'm writing a Java program that saves data to UTF8 text files. However, I'd also like to provide the option to save to IBM437 for compatibility with an old program that uses the same sort of data files.
How can I check to see if the data the user is trying to save isn't representable in IBM437? At the moment the file saves without complaining but results in unusual characters being replaced with question marks.
I'd prefer it if I could show a warning to the user that the data they are saving isn't supported in IBM437. The user could then have the option of manually replacing characters with the nearest ASCII equivalent.
Current code for saving is:
String encoding = "UTF-8";
if (forceLegacySupport)
{
// Force character encoding to IBM437
encoding = "IBM437";
}
BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream(saveFile.getAbsoluteFile()), encoding));
IOController.writeFileToDisk(bw);
bw.close();

As mentioned by JB Nizet in comments you can use charset encoder
and for creating text/String as UTF-8
just a suggestion from my end:
public static char[] cookie = "HEADER_COOKIE".toCharArray();
byte[] cookieInBytes = new byte[COOKIE_SIZE];
for(int i=0;i<cookie.length;i++)
{
if(i < cookie.length)
cookieInBytes[i] = (byte)cookie[i];
}
String headerStr = new String(cookieInBytes,StandardCharsets.UTF_8);

How to split the ByteArray by reading from the file in C++?

I have written a Java program to write the ByteArray in to a file. And that resulting ByteArray is a resulting of these three ByteArrays-
First 2 bytes is my schemaId which I have represented it using short data type.
Then next 8 Bytes is my Last Modified Date which I have represented it using long data type.
And remaining bytes can be of variable size which is my actual value for my attributes..
So I have a file now in which first line contains resulting ByteArray which will have all the above bytes as I mentioned above.. Now I need to read that file from C++ program and read the first line which will contain the ByteArray and then split that resulting ByteArray accordingly as I mentioned above such that I am able to extract my schemaId, Last Modified Date and my actual attribute value from it.
I have done all my coding always in Java and I am new to C++... I am able to write a program in C++ to read the file but not sure how should I read that ByteArray in such a way such that I am able to split it as I mentioned above..
Below is my C++ program which is reading the file and printing it out on the console..
int main () {
string line;
//the variable of type ifstream:
ifstream myfile ("bytearrayfile");
//check to see if the file is opened:
if (myfile.is_open())
{
//while there are still lines in the
//file, keep reading:
while (! myfile.eof() )
{
//place the line from myfile into the
//line variable:
getline (myfile,line);
//display the line we gathered:
// and here split the byte array accordingly..
cout << line << endl;
}
//close the stream:
myfile.close();
}
else cout << "Unable to open file";
return 0;
}
Can anyone help me with that? Thanks.
Update
Below is my java code which will write resulting ByteArray into a file and the same file now I need to read it back from c++..
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
String os = "whatever os is";
byte[] avroBinaryValue = os.getBytes();
long lastModifiedDate = 1379811105109L;
short schemaId = 32767;
ByteArrayOutputStream byteOsTest = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
DataOutputStream outTest = new DataOutputStream(byteOsTest);
outTest.writeShort(schemaId);
outTest.writeLong(lastModifiedDate);
outTest.writeInt(avroBinaryValue.length);
outTest.write(avroBinaryValue);
byte[] allWrittenBytesTest = byteOsTest.toByteArray();
DataInputStream inTest = new DataInputStream(new ByteArrayInputStream(allWrittenBytesTest));
short schemaIdTest = inTest.readShort();
long lastModifiedDateTest = inTest.readLong();
int sizeAvroTest = inTest.readInt();
byte[] avroBinaryValue1 = new byte[sizeAvroTest];
inTest.read(avroBinaryValue1, 0, sizeAvroTest);
System.out.println(schemaIdTest);
System.out.println(lastModifiedDateTest);
System.out.println(new String(avroBinaryValue1));
writeFile(allWrittenBytesTest);
}
/**
* Write the file in Java
* #param byteArray
*/
public static void writeFile(byte[] byteArray) {
try{
File file = new File("bytearrayfile");
FileOutputStream output = new FileOutputStream(file);
IOUtils.write(byteArray, output);
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
}
}

It doesn't look like you want to use std::getline to read this data. Your file isn't written as text data on a line-by-line basis - it basically has a binary format.
You can use the read method of std::ifstream to read arbitrary chunks of data from an input stream. You probably want to open the file in binary mode:
std::ifstream myfile("bytearrayfile", std::ios::binary);
Fundamentally the method you would use to read each record from the file is:
uint16_t schemaId;
uint64_t lastModifiedDate;
uint32_t binaryLength;
myfile.read(reinterpret_cast<char*>(&schemaId), sizeof(schemaId));
myfile.read(reinterpret_cast<char*>(&lastModifiedDate), sizeof(lastModifiedDate));
myfile.read(reinterpret_cast<char*>(&binaryLength), sizeof(binaryLength));
This will read the three static members of your data structure from the file. Because your data is variable size, you probably need to allocate a buffer to read it into, for example:
std::unique_ptr<char[]> binaryBuf(new char[binaryLength]);
myfile.read(binaryBuf.get(), binaryLength);
The above are examples only to illustrate how you would approach this in C++. You will need to be aware of the following things:
There's no error checking in the above examples. You'll need to check that the calls to ifstream::read are successful and return the correct amount of data.
Endianness may be an issue, depending on the the platform the data originates from and is being read on.
Interpreting the lastModifiedDate field may require you to write a function to convert it from whatever format Java uses (I have no idea about Java).

Java : How to determine the correct charset encoding of a stream

With reference to the following thread:
Java App : Unable to read iso-8859-1 encoded file correctly
What is the best way to programatically determine the correct charset encoding of an inputstream/file ?
I have tried using the following:
File in = new File(args[0]);
InputStreamReader r = new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(in));
System.out.println(r.getEncoding());
But on a file which I know to be encoded with ISO8859_1 the above code yields ASCII, which is not correct, and does not allow me to correctly render the content of the file back to the console.

You cannot determine the encoding of a arbitrary byte stream. This is the nature of encodings. A encoding means a mapping between a byte value and its representation. So every encoding "could" be the right.
The getEncoding() method will return the encoding which was set up (read the JavaDoc) for the stream. It will not guess the encoding for you.
Some streams tell you which encoding was used to create them: XML, HTML. But not an arbitrary byte stream.
Anyway, you could try to guess an encoding on your own if you have to. Every language has a common frequency for every char. In English the char e appears very often but ê will appear very very seldom. In a ISO-8859-1 stream there are usually no 0x00 chars. But a UTF-16 stream has a lot of them.
Or: you could ask the user. I've already seen applications which present you a snippet of the file in different encodings and ask you to select the "correct" one.

I have used this library, similar to jchardet for detecting encoding in Java:
https://github.com/albfernandez/juniversalchardet

check this out:
http://site.icu-project.org/ (icu4j)
they have libraries for detecting charset from IOStream
could be simple like this:
BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(input);
CharsetDetector cd = new CharsetDetector();
cd.setText(bis);
CharsetMatch cm = cd.detect();
if (cm != null) {
reader = cm.getReader();
charset = cm.getName();
}else {
throw new UnsupportedCharsetException()
}

Here are my favorites:
TikaEncodingDetector
Dependency:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.any23</groupId>
<artifactId>apache-any23-encoding</artifactId>
<version>1.1</version>
</dependency>
Sample:
public static Charset guessCharset(InputStream is) throws IOException {
return Charset.forName(new TikaEncodingDetector().guessEncoding(is));
}
GuessEncoding
Dependency:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.codehaus.guessencoding</groupId>
<artifactId>guessencoding</artifactId>
<version>1.4</version>
<type>jar</type>
</dependency>
Sample:
public static Charset guessCharset2(File file) throws IOException {
return CharsetToolkit.guessEncoding(file, 4096, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
}

You can certainly validate the file for a particular charset by decoding it with a CharsetDecoder and watching out for "malformed-input" or "unmappable-character" errors. Of course, this only tells you if a charset is wrong; it doesn't tell you if it is correct. For that, you need a basis of comparison to evaluate the decoded results, e.g. do you know beforehand if the characters are restricted to some subset, or whether the text adheres to some strict format? The bottom line is that charset detection is guesswork without any guarantees.

Which library to use?
As of this writing, they are three libraries that emerge:
GuessEncoding
ICU4j
juniversalchardet
I don't include Apache Any23 because it uses ICU4j 3.4 under the hood.
How to tell which one has detected the right charset (or as close as possible)?
It's impossible to certify the charset detected by each above libraries. However, it's possible to ask them in turn and score the returned response.
How to score the returned response?
Each response can be assigned one point. The more points a response have, the more confidence the detected charset has. This is a simple scoring method. You can elaborate others.
Is there any sample code?
Here is a full snippet implementing the strategy described in the previous lines.
public static String guessEncoding(InputStream input) throws IOException {
// Load input data
long count = 0;
int n = 0, EOF = -1;
byte[] buffer = new byte[4096];
ByteArrayOutputStream output = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
while ((EOF != (n = input.read(buffer))) && (count <= Integer.MAX_VALUE)) {
output.write(buffer, 0, n);
count += n;
}
if (count > Integer.MAX_VALUE) {
throw new RuntimeException("Inputstream too large.");
}
byte[] data = output.toByteArray();
// Detect encoding
Map<String, int[]> encodingsScores = new HashMap<>();
// * GuessEncoding
updateEncodingsScores(encodingsScores, new CharsetToolkit(data).guessEncoding().displayName());
// * ICU4j
CharsetDetector charsetDetector = new CharsetDetector();
charsetDetector.setText(data);
charsetDetector.enableInputFilter(true);
CharsetMatch cm = charsetDetector.detect();
if (cm != null) {
updateEncodingsScores(encodingsScores, cm.getName());
}
// * juniversalchardset
UniversalDetector universalDetector = new UniversalDetector(null);
universalDetector.handleData(data, 0, data.length);
universalDetector.dataEnd();
String encodingName = universalDetector.getDetectedCharset();
if (encodingName != null) {
updateEncodingsScores(encodingsScores, encodingName);
}
// Find winning encoding
Map.Entry<String, int[]> maxEntry = null;
for (Map.Entry<String, int[]> e : encodingsScores.entrySet()) {
if (maxEntry == null || (e.getValue()[0] > maxEntry.getValue()[0])) {
maxEntry = e;
}
}
String winningEncoding = maxEntry.getKey();
//dumpEncodingsScores(encodingsScores);
return winningEncoding;
}
private static void updateEncodingsScores(Map<String, int[]> encodingsScores, String encoding) {
String encodingName = encoding.toLowerCase();
int[] encodingScore = encodingsScores.get(encodingName);
if (encodingScore == null) {
encodingsScores.put(encodingName, new int[] { 1 });
} else {
encodingScore[0]++;
}
}
private static void dumpEncodingsScores(Map<String, int[]> encodingsScores) {
System.out.println(toString(encodingsScores));
}
private static String toString(Map<String, int[]> encodingsScores) {
String GLUE = ", ";
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
for (Map.Entry<String, int[]> e : encodingsScores.entrySet()) {
sb.append(e.getKey() + ":" + e.getValue()[0] + GLUE);
}
int len = sb.length();
sb.delete(len - GLUE.length(), len);
return "{ " + sb.toString() + " }";
}
Improvements:
The guessEncoding method reads the inputstream entirely. For large inputstreams this can be a concern. All these libraries would read the whole inputstream. This would imply a large time consumption for detecting the charset.
It's possible to limit the initial data loading to a few bytes and perform the charset detection on those few bytes only.

As far as I know, there is no general library in this context to be suitable for all types of problems. So, for each problem you should test the existing libraries and select the best one which satisfies your problem’s constraints, but often none of them is appropriate. In these cases you can write your own Encoding Detector! As I have wrote ...
I’ve wrote a meta java tool for detecting charset encoding of HTML Web pages, using IBM ICU4j and Mozilla JCharDet as the built-in components. Here you can find my tool, please read the README section before anything else. Also, you can find some basic concepts of this problem in my paper and in its references.
Bellow I provided some helpful comments which I’ve experienced in my work:
Charset detection is not a foolproof process, because it is essentially based on statistical data and what actually happens is guessing not detecting
icu4j is the main tool in this context by IBM, imho
Both TikaEncodingDetector and Lucene-ICU4j are using icu4j and their accuracy had not a meaningful difference from which the icu4j in my tests (at most %1, as I remember)
icu4j is much more general than jchardet, icu4j is just a bit biased to IBM family encodings while jchardet is strongly biased to utf-8
Due to the widespread use of UTF-8 in HTML-world; jchardet is a better choice than icu4j in overall, but is not the best choice!
icu4j is great for East Asian specific encodings like EUC-KR, EUC-JP, SHIFT_JIS, BIG5 and the GB family encodings
Both icu4j and jchardet are debacle in dealing with HTML pages with Windows-1251 and Windows-1256 encodings. Windows-1251 aka cp1251 is widely used for Cyrillic-based languages like Russian and Windows-1256 aka cp1256 is widely used for Arabic
Almost all encoding detection tools are using statistical methods, so the accuracy of output strongly depends on the size and the contents of the input
Some encodings are essentially the same just with a partial differences, so in some cases the guessed or detected encoding may be false but at the same time be true! As about Windows-1252 and ISO-8859-1. (refer to the last paragraph under the 5.2 section of my paper)

The libs above are simple BOM detectors which of course only work if there is a BOM in the beginning of the file. Take a look at http://jchardet.sourceforge.net/ which does scans the text

If you use ICU4J (http://icu-project.org/apiref/icu4j/)
Here is my code:
String charset = "ISO-8859-1"; //Default chartset, put whatever you want
byte[] fileContent = null;
FileInputStream fin = null;
//create FileInputStream object
fin = new FileInputStream(file.getPath());
/*
* Create byte array large enough to hold the content of the file.
* Use File.length to determine size of the file in bytes.
*/
fileContent = new byte[(int) file.length()];
/*
* To read content of the file in byte array, use
* int read(byte[] byteArray) method of java FileInputStream class.
*
*/
fin.read(fileContent);
byte[] data = fileContent;
CharsetDetector detector = new CharsetDetector();
detector.setText(data);
CharsetMatch cm = detector.detect();
if (cm != null) {
int confidence = cm.getConfidence();
System.out.println("Encoding: " + cm.getName() + " - Confidence: " + confidence + "%");
//Here you have the encode name and the confidence
//In my case if the confidence is > 50 I return the encode, else I return the default value
if (confidence > 50) {
charset = cm.getName();
}
}
Remember to put all the try-catch need it.
I hope this works for you.

If you don't know the encoding of your data, it is not so easy to determine, but you could try to use a library to guess it. Also, there is a similar question.

I found a nice third party library which can detect actual encoding:
http://glaforge.free.fr/wiki/index.php?wiki=GuessEncoding
I didn't test it extensively but it seems to work.

For ISO8859_1 files, there is not an easy way to distinguish them from ASCII. For Unicode files however one can generally detect this based on the first few bytes of the file.
UTF-8 and UTF-16 files include a Byte Order Mark (BOM) at the very beginning of the file. The BOM is a zero-width non-breaking space.
Unfortunately, for historical reasons, Java does not detect this automatically. Programs like Notepad will check the BOM and use the appropriate encoding. Using unix or Cygwin, you can check the BOM with the file command. For example:
$ file sample2.sql
sample2.sql: Unicode text, UTF-16, big-endian
For Java, I suggest you check out this code, which will detect the common file formats and select the correct encoding: How to read a file and automatically specify the correct encoding

An alternative to TikaEncodingDetector is to use Tika AutoDetectReader.
Charset charset = new AutoDetectReader(new FileInputStream(file)).getCharset();

A good strategy to handle this, is with a way to auto detect the input charset.
I use org.xml.sax.InputSource in Java 11 to solve it:
...
import org.xml.sax.InputSource;
...
InputSource inputSource = new InputSource(inputStream);
inputStreamReader = new InputStreamReader(
inputSource.getByteStream(), inputSource.getEncoding()
);
Input sample:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<rss xmlns:dc="https://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" version="2.0">
<channel>
...**strong text**

In plain Java:
final String[] encodings = { "US-ASCII", "ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8", "UTF-16BE", "UTF-16LE", "UTF-16" };
List<String> lines;
for (String encoding : encodings) {
try {
lines = Files.readAllLines(path, Charset.forName(encoding));
for (String line : lines) {
// do something...
}
break;
} catch (IOException ioe) {
System.out.println(encoding + " failed, trying next.");
}
}
This approach will try the encodings one by one until one works or we run out of them.
(BTW my encodings list has only those items because they are the charsets implementations required on every Java platform, https://docs.oracle.com/javase/9/docs/api/java/nio/charset/Charset.html)

Can you pick the appropriate char set in the Constructor:
new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(in), "ISO8859_1");