Example

public static void main( String[] args ) {
// Assume default charset ISO-8859-1 and file with UTF-16BE content
FileReader fileReader = null;
try {
fileReader = new java.io.FileReader( "file1" ); //$NON-NLS-1$
System.out.println( fileReader.read() );
} catch ( IOException e ) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}



Solution
To specify charater encoding values yourself, construct an InputStreamReader with CharsetDecoder on a FileInputStream.

public static void main( String[] args ) {
// Assume default charset ISO-8859-1 and file with UTF-16BE content
InputStreamReader reader = null;
try {
reader = new InputStreamReader( new FileInputStream("file1"), "UTF-16BE");
System.out.println( reader.read() );
} catch ( IOException e ) {
e.printStackTrace();
}

}