# 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.

Although Saxon now supports any encoding that the Java VM supports, it still handles certain encodings itself, because this is more efficient and more reliable. The encodings that Saxon supports directly (including synonyms) are ASCII, US-ASCII, iso-646, iso646, iso-8859-1, ISO8859_1, iso-8859-2, ISO8859_2, UTF-8, UTF8, UTF-16, UTF16, KOI8-R, cp1250, windows-1250, cp1251, windows-1251, cp1252, windows-1252, cp852, windows-852.

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