DefaultCharset

A Charset is a mapping between sequences of 16-bit Unicode code units and sequences of bytes. Charsets are used when encoding characters into bytes and decoding bytes into characters.

Using APIs that rely on the JVM's default Charset under the hood is dangerous. The default charset can vary from machine to machine or JVM to JVM. This can lead to unstable character encoding/decoding between runs of your program, even for ASCII characters (e.g.: A is 0100 0001 in UTF-8, but is 0000 0000 0100 0001 in UTF-16).

If you need stable encoding/decoding, you must specify an explicit charset. The StandardCharsets class provides these constants for you.

When in doubt, use UTF-8.