gistfile1.txt

In the internal Java representation a String is a sequence of 16 bit "char"s representing UTF-16 code units.

.getBytes converts the string to a sequence of bytes according to a specific "charset".

The "UTF-16" charset encodes each UTF16 code unit as a pair of bytes which may be either big endian or little endian according to the platform. To mark which byte order is in use it prepends a "byte order mark".

The byte order mark is the unicode code point U+FFFE. When encoded in little endian bytes this comes out to "0xFE","0xFF" which when interpreted as signed twos-complement numbers display as "-2" "-1"

The "UTF-16LE" charset does not use a byte-order mark.