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'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.

Answer 2

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/

Answer 3

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