Setting the default Java character encoding

Question

How do I properly set the default character encoding used by the JVM  1 5 x  programmatically   I have read that -Dfile encoding whatever used to be the way to go for older JVMs  I don t have that luxury for reasons I wont get into   I have tried   System setProperty  file encoding    UTF-8      And the property gets set  but it doesn t seem to cause the final getBytes call below to use UTF8   System setProperty  file encoding    UTF-8     byte inbytes     new byte 1024    FileInputStream fis   new FileInputStream  response txt    fis read inbytes   FileOutputStream fos   new FileOutputStream  response-2 txt    String in   new String inbytes   UTF8    fos write in getBytes

User · Answer

I can t answer your original question but I would like to offer you some advice -- don t depend on the JVM s default encoding   It s always best to explicitly specify the desired encoding  i e   UTF-8   in your code   That way  you know it will work even across different systems and JVM configurations

User · Answer

From the JVM    Tool Interface documentation        Since the command-line cannot always be accessed or modified  for example in embedded VMs or simply VMs launched deep within scripts  a JAVA TOOL OPTIONS variable is provided so that agents may be launched in these cases    By setting the  Windows  environment variable JAVA TOOL OPTIONS to -Dfile encoding UTF8  the  Java  System property will be set automatically every time a JVM is started  You will know that the parameter has been picked up because the following message will be posted to System err      Picked up JAVA TOOL OPTIONS  -Dfile encoding UTF8

User · Answer

Unfortunately  the file encoding property has to be specified as the JVM starts up  by the time your main method is entered  the character encoding used by String getBytes   and the default constructors of InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter has been permanently cached   As Edward Grech points out  in a special case like this  the environment variable JAVA TOOL OPTIONS can be used to specify this property  but it s normally done like this   java -Dfile encoding UTF-8     com x Main   Charset defaultCharset   will reflect changes to the file encoding property  but most of the code in the core Java libraries that need to determine the default character encoding do not use this mechanism   When you are encoding or decoding  you can query the file encoding property or Charset defaultCharset   to find the current default encoding  and use the appropriate method or constructor overload to specify it

User · Answer

I m using Amazon  AWS  Elastic Beanstalk and successfully changed it to UTF-8    In Elastic Beanstalk  go to Configuration   Software   Environment properties   Add  name  JAVA TOOL OPTIONS with  value  -Dfile encoding UTF8  After saving  the environment will restart with the UTF-8 encoding

User · Answer

Not clear on what you do and don t have control over at this point  If you can interpose a different OutputStream class on the destination file  you could use a subtype of OutputStream which converts Strings to bytes under a charset you define  say UTF-8 by default  If modified UTF-8 is suffcient for your needs  you can use DataOutputStream writeUTF String    byte inbytes     new byte 1024   FileInputStream fis   new FileInputStream  response txt    fis read inbytes   String in   new String inbytes   UTF8    DataOutputStream out   new DataOutputStream new FileOutputStream  response-2 txt     out writeUTF in      no getBytes   here   If this approach is not feasible  it may help if you clarify here exactly what you can and can t control in terms of data flow and execution environment  though I know that s sometimes easier said than determined   Good luck

User · Answer

Unfortunately  the file encoding property has to be specified as the JVM starts up  by the time your main method is entered  the character encoding used by String getBytes   and the default constructors of InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter has been permanently cached   As Edward Grech points out  in a special case like this  the environment variable JAVA TOOL OPTIONS can be used to specify this property  but it s normally done like this   java -Dfile encoding UTF-8     com x Main   Charset defaultCharset   will reflect changes to the file encoding property  but most of the code in the core Java libraries that need to determine the default character encoding do not use this mechanism   When you are encoding or decoding  you can query the file encoding property or Charset defaultCharset   to find the current default encoding  and use the appropriate method or constructor overload to specify it

User · Answer

I can t answer your original question but I would like to offer you some advice -- don t depend on the JVM s default encoding   It s always best to explicitly specify the desired encoding  i e   UTF-8   in your code   That way  you know it will work even across different systems and JVM configurations

User · Answer

We were having the same issues   We methodically tried several suggestions from this article  and others  to no avail   We also tried adding the -Dfile encoding UTF8 and nothing seemed to be working     For people that are having this issue  the following article finally helped us track down describes how the locale setting can break unicode UTF-8 in Java Tomcat  http   www jvmhost com articles locale-breaks-unicode-utf-8-java-tomcat  Setting the locale correctly in the    bashrc file worked for us

User · Answer

mvn clean install -Dfile encoding UTF-8 -Dmaven repo local  path-to-m2   command worked with exec-maven-plugin to resolve following error while configuring a jenkins task   Java HotSpot TM  64-Bit Server VM warning  ignoring option MaxPermSize 512m  support was removed in 8 0 Error occurred during initialization of VM java nio charset IllegalCharsetNameException   UTF-8      at java nio charset Charset checkName Charset java 315      at java nio charset Charset lookup2 Charset java 484      at java nio charset Charset lookup Charset java 464      at java nio charset Charset defaultCharset Charset java 609      at sun nio cs StreamEncoder forOutputStreamWriter StreamEncoder java 56      at java io OutputStreamWriter  lt init gt  OutputStreamWriter java 111      at java io PrintStream  lt init gt  PrintStream java 104      at java io PrintStream  lt init gt  PrintStream java 151      at java lang System newPrintStream System java 1148      at java lang System initializeSystemClass System java 1192

User · Answer

I think a better approach than setting the platform s default character set  especially as you seem to have restrictions on affecting the application deployment  let alone the platform  is to call the much safer String getBytes  charsetName    That way your application is not dependent on things beyond its control   I personally feel that String getBytes   should be deprecated  as it has caused serious problems in a number of cases I have seen  where the developer did not account for the default charset possibly changing

User · Answer

Try this         new OutputStreamWriter  new FileOutputStream  Your file fullpath    Charset forName  UTF8

User · Answer

Following  Caspar comment on accepted answer  the preferred way to fix this according to Sun is     change the locale of the underlying platform before starting your Java program    http   bugs java com view bug do bug id 4163515  For docker see   http   jaredmarkell com docker-and-locales

User · Answer

My team encountered the same issue in machines with Windows   then managed to resolve it in two ways  a  Set enviroment variable  even in Windows system preferences  JAVA TOOL OPTIONS  -Dfile encoding UTF8 b  Introduce following snippet to your pom xml   -Dfile encoding UTF-8   WITHIN   lt jvmArguments gt   -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp transport dt socket server y suspend n address 8001  -Dfile encoding UTF-8   lt  jvmArguments gt

User · Answer

We set there two system properties together and it makes the system take everything into utf8  file encoding UTF8 client encoding override UTF-8

User · Answer

From the JVM    Tool Interface documentation        Since the command-line cannot always be accessed or modified  for example in embedded VMs or simply VMs launched deep within scripts  a JAVA TOOL OPTIONS variable is provided so that agents may be launched in these cases    By setting the  Windows  environment variable JAVA TOOL OPTIONS to -Dfile encoding UTF8  the  Java  System property will be set automatically every time a JVM is started  You will know that the parameter has been picked up because the following message will be posted to System err      Picked up JAVA TOOL OPTIONS  -Dfile encoding UTF8

User · Answer

I think a better approach than setting the platform s default character set  especially as you seem to have restrictions on affecting the application deployment  let alone the platform  is to call the much safer String getBytes  charsetName    That way your application is not dependent on things beyond its control   I personally feel that String getBytes   should be deprecated  as it has caused serious problems in a number of cases I have seen  where the developer did not account for the default charset possibly changing

User · Answer

I m using Amazon  AWS  Elastic Beanstalk and successfully changed it to UTF-8    In Elastic Beanstalk  go to Configuration   Software   Environment properties   Add  name  JAVA TOOL OPTIONS with  value  -Dfile encoding UTF8  After saving  the environment will restart with the UTF-8 encoding

User · Answer

My team encountered the same issue in machines with Windows   then managed to resolve it in two ways  a  Set enviroment variable  even in Windows system preferences  JAVA TOOL OPTIONS  -Dfile encoding UTF8 b  Introduce following snippet to your pom xml   -Dfile encoding UTF-8   WITHIN   lt jvmArguments gt   -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp transport dt socket server y suspend n address 8001  -Dfile encoding UTF-8   lt  jvmArguments gt

User · Answer

I think a better approach than setting the platform s default character set  especially as you seem to have restrictions on affecting the application deployment  let alone the platform  is to call the much safer String getBytes  charsetName    That way your application is not dependent on things beyond its control   I personally feel that String getBytes   should be deprecated  as it has caused serious problems in a number of cases I have seen  where the developer did not account for the default charset possibly changing

User · Answer

In case you are using Spring Boot and want to pass the argument file encoding in JVM you have to run it like that   mvn spring-boot run -Drun jvmArguments  -Dfile encoding UTF-8    this was needed for us since we were using JTwig templates and the operating system had ANSI X3 4-1968 that we found out through System out println System getProperty  file encoding      Hope this helps someone

User · Answer

I have tried a lot of things  but the sample code here works perfect  Link  The crux of the code is   String s                          String out   new String s getBytes  UTF-8     ISO-8859-1

User · Answer

mvn clean install -Dfile encoding UTF-8 -Dmaven repo local  path-to-m2   command worked with exec-maven-plugin to resolve following error while configuring a jenkins task   Java HotSpot TM  64-Bit Server VM warning  ignoring option MaxPermSize 512m  support was removed in 8 0 Error occurred during initialization of VM java nio charset IllegalCharsetNameException   UTF-8      at java nio charset Charset checkName Charset java 315      at java nio charset Charset lookup2 Charset java 484      at java nio charset Charset lookup Charset java 464      at java nio charset Charset defaultCharset Charset java 609      at sun nio cs StreamEncoder forOutputStreamWriter StreamEncoder java 56      at java io OutputStreamWriter  lt init gt  OutputStreamWriter java 111      at java io PrintStream  lt init gt  PrintStream java 104      at java io PrintStream  lt init gt  PrintStream java 151      at java lang System newPrintStream System java 1148      at java lang System initializeSystemClass System java 1192

User · Answer

We were having the same issues   We methodically tried several suggestions from this article  and others  to no avail   We also tried adding the -Dfile encoding UTF8 and nothing seemed to be working     For people that are having this issue  the following article finally helped us track down describes how the locale setting can break unicode UTF-8 in Java Tomcat  http   www jvmhost com articles locale-breaks-unicode-utf-8-java-tomcat  Setting the locale correctly in the    bashrc file worked for us

User · Answer

Not clear on what you do and don t have control over at this point  If you can interpose a different OutputStream class on the destination file  you could use a subtype of OutputStream which converts Strings to bytes under a charset you define  say UTF-8 by default  If modified UTF-8 is suffcient for your needs  you can use DataOutputStream writeUTF String    byte inbytes     new byte 1024   FileInputStream fis   new FileInputStream  response txt    fis read inbytes   String in   new String inbytes   UTF8    DataOutputStream out   new DataOutputStream new FileOutputStream  response-2 txt     out writeUTF in      no getBytes   here   If this approach is not feasible  it may help if you clarify here exactly what you can and can t control in terms of data flow and execution environment  though I know that s sometimes easier said than determined   Good luck

User · Answer

Not clear on what you do and don t have control over at this point  If you can interpose a different OutputStream class on the destination file  you could use a subtype of OutputStream which converts Strings to bytes under a charset you define  say UTF-8 by default  If modified UTF-8 is suffcient for your needs  you can use DataOutputStream writeUTF String    byte inbytes     new byte 1024   FileInputStream fis   new FileInputStream  response txt    fis read inbytes   String in   new String inbytes   UTF8    DataOutputStream out   new DataOutputStream new FileOutputStream  response-2 txt     out writeUTF in      no getBytes   here   If this approach is not feasible  it may help if you clarify here exactly what you can and can t control in terms of data flow and execution environment  though I know that s sometimes easier said than determined   Good luck

User · Answer

I have a hacky way that definitely works    System setProperty  file encoding   UTF-8    Field charset   Charset class getDeclaredField  defaultCharset    charset setAccessible true   charset set null null     This way you are going to trick JVM which would think that charset is not set and make it to set it again to UTF-8  on runtime

User · Answer

Not clear on what you do and don t have control over at this point  If you can interpose a different OutputStream class on the destination file  you could use a subtype of OutputStream which converts Strings to bytes under a charset you define  say UTF-8 by default  If modified UTF-8 is suffcient for your needs  you can use DataOutputStream writeUTF String    byte inbytes     new byte 1024   FileInputStream fis   new FileInputStream  response txt    fis read inbytes   String in   new String inbytes   UTF8    DataOutputStream out   new DataOutputStream new FileOutputStream  response-2 txt     out writeUTF in      no getBytes   here   If this approach is not feasible  it may help if you clarify here exactly what you can and can t control in terms of data flow and execution environment  though I know that s sometimes easier said than determined   Good luck

User · Answer

I can t answer your original question but I would like to offer you some advice -- don t depend on the JVM s default encoding   It s always best to explicitly specify the desired encoding  i e   UTF-8   in your code   That way  you know it will work even across different systems and JVM configurations

User · Answer

Try this         new OutputStreamWriter  new FileOutputStream  Your file fullpath    Charset forName  UTF8

User · Answer

Solve this problem in my project  Hope it helps someone  I use LIBGDX java framework and also had this issue in my android studio project  In Mac OS encoding is correct  but in Windows 10 special characters and symbols and also russian characters show as questions like        and other incorrect symbols   Change in android studio project settings  File- gt Settings   - gt Editor- gt  File Encodings to UTF-8 in all three fields  Global Encoding  Project Encoding and Default below    In any java file set  System setProperty  quot file encoding quot   quot UTF-8 quot     And for test print debug log  System out println  quot My project encoding is    quot   Charset defaultCharset

User · Answer

I think a better approach than setting the platform s default character set  especially as you seem to have restrictions on affecting the application deployment  let alone the platform  is to call the much safer String getBytes  charsetName    That way your application is not dependent on things beyond its control   I personally feel that String getBytes   should be deprecated  as it has caused serious problems in a number of cases I have seen  where the developer did not account for the default charset possibly changing

User · Answer

I have tried a lot of things  but the sample code here works perfect  Link  The crux of the code is   String s                          String out   new String s getBytes  UTF-8     ISO-8859-1

User · Answer

In case you are using Spring Boot and want to pass the argument file encoding in JVM you have to run it like that   mvn spring-boot run -Drun jvmArguments  -Dfile encoding UTF-8    this was needed for us since we were using JTwig templates and the operating system had ANSI X3 4-1968 that we found out through System out println System getProperty  file encoding      Hope this helps someone

User · Answer

Recently I bumped into a local company s Notes 6 5 system and found out the webmail would show unidentifiable characters on a non-Zhongwen localed Windows installation  Have dug for several weeks online  figured it out just few minutes ago   In Java properties  add the following string to Runtime Parameters  -Dfile encoding MS950 -Duser language zh -Duser country TW -Dsun jnu encoding MS950   UTF-8 setting would not work in this case

User · Answer

Unfortunately  the file encoding property has to be specified as the JVM starts up  by the time your main method is entered  the character encoding used by String getBytes   and the default constructors of InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter has been permanently cached   As Edward Grech points out  in a special case like this  the environment variable JAVA TOOL OPTIONS can be used to specify this property  but it s normally done like this   java -Dfile encoding UTF-8     com x Main   Charset defaultCharset   will reflect changes to the file encoding property  but most of the code in the core Java libraries that need to determine the default character encoding do not use this mechanism   When you are encoding or decoding  you can query the file encoding property or Charset defaultCharset   to find the current default encoding  and use the appropriate method or constructor overload to specify it

User · Answer

Recently I bumped into a local company s Notes 6 5 system and found out the webmail would show unidentifiable characters on a non-Zhongwen localed Windows installation  Have dug for several weeks online  figured it out just few minutes ago   In Java properties  add the following string to Runtime Parameters  -Dfile encoding MS950 -Duser language zh -Duser country TW -Dsun jnu encoding MS950   UTF-8 setting would not work in this case

User · Answer

I can t answer your original question but I would like to offer you some advice -- don t depend on the JVM s default encoding   It s always best to explicitly specify the desired encoding  i e   UTF-8   in your code   That way  you know it will work even across different systems and JVM configurations

User · Answer

I have a hacky way that definitely works    System setProperty  file encoding   UTF-8    Field charset   Charset class getDeclaredField  defaultCharset    charset setAccessible true   charset set null null     This way you are going to trick JVM which would think that charset is not set and make it to set it again to UTF-8  on runtime

User · Answer

We set there two system properties together and it makes the system take everything into utf8  file encoding UTF8 client encoding override UTF-8

User · Answer

Unfortunately  the file encoding property has to be specified as the JVM starts up  by the time your main method is entered  the character encoding used by String getBytes   and the default constructors of InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter has been permanently cached   As Edward Grech points out  in a special case like this  the environment variable JAVA TOOL OPTIONS can be used to specify this property  but it s normally done like this   java -Dfile encoding UTF-8     com x Main   Charset defaultCharset   will reflect changes to the file encoding property  but most of the code in the core Java libraries that need to determine the default character encoding do not use this mechanism   When you are encoding or decoding  you can query the file encoding property or Charset defaultCharset   to find the current default encoding  and use the appropriate method or constructor overload to specify it

User · Answer

Following  Caspar comment on accepted answer  the preferred way to fix this according to Sun is     change the locale of the underlying platform before starting your Java program    http   bugs java com view bug do bug id 4163515  For docker see   http   jaredmarkell com docker-and-locales

User · Answer

Solve this problem in my project  Hope it helps someone  I use LIBGDX java framework and also had this issue in my android studio project  In Mac OS encoding is correct  but in Windows 10 special characters and symbols and also russian characters show as questions like        and other incorrect symbols   Change in android studio project settings  File- gt Settings   - gt Editor- gt  File Encodings to UTF-8 in all three fields  Global Encoding  Project Encoding and Default below    In any java file set  System setProperty  quot file encoding quot   quot UTF-8 quot     And for test print debug log  System out println  quot My project encoding is    quot   Charset defaultCharset

[java] Setting the default Java character encoding

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