converting 16bit strings to 8bit

I'm using LineNumberReader to read lines from a textfile. Everything works cool, but recently I tried to read a windows text file, which seems to be 16bit unicode or something like that. Every character is represented by 2 bytes... no, it's not a .doc file or something, it's plain text.

Now, I need to convert the String to a "normal" 8bit String, so that my following functions can work with this textfile. I could'nt find a function to do this. For now, I'm converting the String by manually copying every second character to another String.

Is there a more handy way to do this?

Thanks!

Use RandomAccessFile.

Well, I'm checking those strings character for character anyway. I just thought there would be a function to do this.