I read in a comment to an answer by @Esailija to a question of mine that

ISO-8859-1 is the only encoding to fully retain the original binary data, with exact byte<->codepoint matches

I also read in this answer by @AaronDigulla that :

In Java, ISO-8859-1 (a.k.a ISO-Latin1) is a 1:1 mapping

I need some insight on this. This will fail (as illustrated here) :

// \u00F6 is รถ
System.out.println(Arrays.toString("\u00F6".getBytes("utf-8")));
// prints [-61, -74]
System.out.println(Arrays.toString("\u00F6".getBytes("ISO-8859-1")));
// prints [-10]

Questions

  1. I admit I do not quite get it - why does it not get the bytes in the code above ?
  2. Most importantly, where is this (byte preserving behavior of ISO-8859-1) specified - links to source, or JSL would be nice. Is it the only encoding with this property ?
  3. Is it related to ISO-8859-1 being the default default ?

See also this question for nice counter examples from other charsets.

java character-encoding iso-8859-1
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