What is a file encoding?
A file encoding is the standard used to encode character data in a file. A string identifying the file encoding is stored in the file.encoding property of the System class. The file encoding is significant because the Java programming language uses Unicode for characters, but the file system of the host platform probably uses some other encoding. This encoding varies with host platform and locale. If the encoding matches the file.encoding property, then the conversion of the character data into Unicode is transparent to the programmer.
