# Character Encodings Supported

The encodings supported on input depend entirely on your choice of XML parser.

On output, any encoding supported by the Java VM may be used.

The encodings `iso-646` and `iso646` (in any mixture of upper and lower case) are recognized as synonyms of `US-ASCII`, even though they are not supported directly by JDK 1.4.

There are some differences between the character encodings supported by the old `java.io` package and the new `java.nio` package. If the requested encoding is not supported by the `java.nio` package, then all non-ASCII characters will be represented using numeric character references. If the encoding is not supported by the `java.io` package, then Saxon will revert to using UTF-8 as the actual output encoding.

A list of the character encodings supported in the `java.nio` package can be obtained by using the command `java net.sf.saxon.charcode.CharacterSetFactory`, with no parameters. Java does not provide any means of determining the list of encodings supported by the `java.io` package.

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