Howto let the SAX parser determine the encoding from the xml declaration?

Use InputStream as argument to InputSource when you want Sax to autodetect the encoding.

If you want to set a specific encoding, use Reader with a specified encoding or setEncoding method.

Why? Because autodetection encoding algorithms require raw data, not converted to characters.

The question in the subject is: How to let the SAX parser determine the encoding from the xml declaration? I found Allan's answer to the question misleading and I provided the alternative one, based on Jörn Horstmann's comment and my later experience.

I found the answer myself.

The SAX parser uses InputSource internally and from the InputSource docs:

The SAX parser will use the InputSource object to determine how to read XML input. If there is a character stream available, the parser will read that stream directly, disregarding any text encoding declaration found in that stream. If there is no character stream, but there is a byte stream, the parser will use that byte stream, using the encoding specified in the InputSource or else (if no encoding is specified) autodetecting the character encoding using an algorithm such as the one in the XML specification. If neither a character stream nor a byte stream is available, the parser will attempt to open a URI connection to the resource identified by the system identifier.

So basically you need to pass a character stream to the parser for it to pick-up the correct encoding. See solution below:

SAXParserFactory factory = SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
SAXParser parser = factory.newSAXParser();
FeedHandler handler = new FeedHandler();
Reader isr = new InputStreamReader(getInputStream());
InputSource is = new InputSource();
is.setCharacterStream(isr);
parser.parse(is, handler);