"david.lloyd(a)jboss.com" wrote : | UTF-16 on the other hand, being the native encoding for Java, is written one char at a time without transcoding - no shifts, no comparisons, no bitmasks. It's just a straight write of chars. You can't possibly do better than that in terms of processing speed. Even for UT-16 I believe for the high planes of unicode the characters have to be encoded using pairs of chars, so it's not quite a simple write of chars but pretty close. But in any case, simple comparisons and bitwise operations are fast. I doubt this is the reason why the encoding is slow. My bet, as mentioned before is there is some other overhead due to the setup of the codec classes. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4150827#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...