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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