posted 22 years ago
Hi Jimmy,
Here goes.
Conditions under which platform default encoding conversion should be used -
For this I would have said that most Operating Systems know what part of the world they are operating in as they are given this information when they were installed. The machines locale is accessible by the JVM & by default the encoding used by a reader or writer is the one appropriate to the machines locale. So if your only dealing with our systems in your locale or that have the same locale setup on their system you would use the default encoding conversion.
Conditions under which a specific conversion should be used -
If you are reading/writing data that crosses a locale boundary you may have to specify what locale to use. The JVM will then use a different encoding version for that local. For example a writer may be connected to a socket which communicates with a machine in a different local.
I hope this helps. Basically it depends on if your readers/writers are working with machines in the same locale.