Question

What I’m trying to do is generate an array of chars that represent certain ASCII values in a certain ISO/IEC charset. Let’s say, if I’m intersted in ASCII values 211-217 of ISO/IEC 8859-7 charset then the result should be { Σ, Τ, Υ, Φ, Χ, Ψ, Ω }. I tried this:

for (int i = 211; i <= 217; i++) {
    System.out.println(String.valueOf((char)i));
}

But the results are based on the default system charset.

Answer 1

You cannot convert individual character codes in particular encoding to chars directly, therefore you need to use byte[] to String conversion instead. Since ISO-8859-7 is a single-byte encoding, each character code corresponds to one byte:

Charset cs = Charset.forName("ISO-8859-7");
for (int i = 211; i <= 217; i++) {
    String s = new String(new byte[] { (byte) i }, cs)
    System.out.println(
        String.format("Character %s, codepoint %04X", s, (int) s.charAt(0)));
} 

EDIT: Using the output format given above you can make sure that Unicode code points are decoded correctly, as specified by ISO-8859-7. If you still see ?s instead of characters, it’s a problem with output – your console doesn’t support these characters.

Check a result of System.getProperty("file.encoding") – it should be some kind of Unicode (UTF-8, etc). If you run your code from IDE check its configuration for console encoding settings.