It's amazing how writing clarifies your thinking. No sooner had I sent
off this email than I immediately realized my mistake, whichh I had been
trying to understand for 2 hours.

Encode is an object--not a method!

As soon as I changed

String the_characters = encode(ch);

to


String the_characters = encode.getNewEncoding(ch);

Everything worked as it should.

I tried to post my correction, but my email didn't show up right away. I
checked again and again and after an hour I had to get to bed.