Read unicode text files with java

Some notes:

• the "UTF-16" encoding can read either little- or big-endian encoded files marked with a BOM; see here for a list of Java 6 encodings; it is not explicitly stated what endianness will be used when writing using "UTF-16" - it appears to be big-endian - so you might want to use "UnicodeLittle" when saving the data
• be careful when using String class encode/decode methods, especially with a marked variable-width encoding like UTF-16 - use them only on whole data
• as others have said, it is often best to read character data by wrapping your InputStream with an InputStreamReader; you can concatenate your input into a single String using a StringBuilder or similar buffer.

Check https://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/io/InputStreamReader.html.

I would read source file with something like:

Reader in = new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream("file"), "UTF-8"));

I would recommend to use UnicodeReader from Google Data API, see this answer for a similar question. It will automatically detect encoding from the Byte order mark (BOM).

You may also consider BOMInputStream in Apache Commons IO which does basically the same but does not cover all alternative versions of BOM.

you wouldn't wrap the Reader, instead you would wrap the stream using an InputStreamReader. You could then wrap that with your BufferedReader that you currently use

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(stream, encoding));