Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

hi guys,

i have a big (at least for me :P) problem:
i have to parse a xml-file which contains german umlauts. the encoding in the xml-"header" is set to "ISO-8859-1". the umlauts in the file are like this: "Ö" (html-style).
now i'm parsing the xml-file and saving some names in a hashtable. associated to every name is a vector.

my problem: i don't know how java saves the umlauts in the hashtable!
i always get a nullpointerexception when i try to get the size of a vector associated to a name containing umlauts!

i'm totally confused with all the encodings and charsets...
guess it ain't a big problem, but actually i don't see how to solve it...

hope you can help me! :)

thx
PL