Convert Encoding of system properties

Question

Hello,
I wrote a little piece of code wich reads directory names and file names and write them to an DOM tree. If I use "ISO-8859-1" for the output format, it works fine, but when I switch to "UTF-8", the resulting xml-file contains illegal characters. I suppose, that File.getName() returns the file name in the current encoding of systems locale, and Node.appendChild does not any conversion between "ISO-8859-1" (perhaps the encoding of my Windows XP) and "UTF-8" (Java standard).
Somethere in my code is a line like this:
ElementFolderName.appendChild(RelatedDocument.createTextNode(file.getName()));For serializing I use org.apache.xml.serialize.XMLSerializer:
XMLSerializer serializer = new XMLSerializer();
OutputFormat of = new OutputFormat(d);
of.setEncoding("ISO-8859-1");
serializer.setOutputFormat(of);
serializer.setOutputCharStream(new java.io.FileWriter(OutputFile));
serializer.asDOMSerializer();
serializer.serialize(d);I have two questions:
1) Is there any function to get the encoding of system strings?
2) Is there any function to convert the encoding on the fly, like String getUTF-8(String s, String Encoding)?
Thanks,
Stefan

Answer 1

"Invalid characters" means that the encoding of the characters probably don't fit the utf-8 spec. The serialization is successful finished, and I check the resulting xml-files with OxygenXML, which reports an "UTF-8 - java.nio.charset.MalformedInputException". So I'm pretty sure the xml-files are incorrect (and it is not a problem of the text editor). The issue regards file-names containing some german characters like "öäü". I don't think that this is a problem of serialization, because I run document building and serialization in the easiest possible way.