Why you shouldn't go back and forth on UTF-8 strings for binary data

gistfile1.scala

// Run in a REPL
val bl : List[Byte] = List(-78,-5,-112,-31,127,-59,1,94,12,7,84,112,82,41,-95,50)
val ba = bl.toArray
val bs = new String(ba, "UTF-8")

bl.length
ba.length
bs.length
// Notice they aren't all equal

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5250324/byte-array-to-string-and-back-issues-with-127