Encode String to UTF-8

How about using

ByteBuffer byteBuffer = StandardCharsets.UTF_8.encode(myString)

Use byte[] ptext = String.getBytes("UTF-8"); instead of getBytes(). getBytes() uses so-called "default encoding", which may not be UTF-8.

In Java7 you can use:

import static java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets.*;

byte[] ptext = myString.getBytes(ISO_8859_1); 
String value = new String(ptext, UTF_8); 

This has the advantage over getBytes(String) that it does not declare throws UnsupportedEncodingException.

If you're using an older Java version you can declare the charset constants yourself:

import java.nio.charset.Charset;

public class StandardCharsets {
    public static final Charset ISO_8859_1 = Charset.forName("ISO-8859-1");
    public static final Charset UTF_8 = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
    //....
}

String objects in Java use the UTF-16 encoding that can't be modified^*.

The only thing that can have a different encoding is a byte[]. So if you need UTF-8 data, then you need a byte[]. If you have a String that contains unexpected data, then the problem is at some earlier place that incorrectly converted some binary data to a String (i.e. it was using the wrong encoding).

^{* As a matter of implementation, String can internally use a ISO-8859-1 encoded byte[] when the range of characters fits it, but that is an implementation-specific optimization that isn't visible to users of String (i.e. you'll never notice unless you dig into the source code or use reflection to dig into a String object).}