> UTF-8 should always be present (according to the JLS), and as a multi-byte > format should be able to encode any character that you would need to. >
UTF-8 cannot encode arbitrary data. All data that we store in accumulo is not characters. A safe encoding to use as a pass through when you don't know if you are dealing with characters is ISO-8859-1 since we know that we can make the round trip from bytes to string to bytes without loss.
