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());

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

We set there two system properties together and it makes the system take everything into utf8

file.encoding=UTF8
client.encoding.override＝UTF-8

Answer 3

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!

Answer 4

Try this :

    new OutputStreamWriter( new FileOutputStream("Your_file_fullpath" ),Charset.forName("UTF8"))

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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.