Encoding, get ASCII as default encoding

Question

Hi,
I'm using Linux (Red Hat 8), where I have installed Java .1.4. Now when I try to parse xml feed from request.inputStream im getting wrong encoding values.
Im storing all the xmlfeeds when i receive on seperate files, but when I get the encoding for the files I get ASCII. Doesn't java have UTF-8 as default encoding? Even thought I have explicitly told that the input is utf-8 (request.setEncoding ("utf-8")) it does not work.
Therefore im getting wrong values stored on the database (utf-8 tables).
Where is the default encoding ASCII come from ?
Can anyone please answer..

Answer 1

thank you for the replay,
After your advise im now being more strict about encoding to utf-8. Im doing following:
1. setting request to utf-8 explicitly. request.setCaracterEncoding("utf"))2. opening bufferedStreamReader with encoding parm.
with request.getInputStreamreader
String xmlString = null
String line;
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
                         request.getInputStream(),"UTF-8"));
     while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
               xmlString += line + "\r\n";
     }3. Then dump the string to a file to verify that i got the right encoding:
File f = new File ("out.xml");
            FileOutputStream fos = null;
            OutputStreamWriter out = null;
     fos = new FileOutputStream(f);
     out = new OutputStreamWriter(fos, "UTF-8");
           Writer w =  new BufferedWriter(out);
     w.write(xmlString);           4. when i finally take upload on the out.xml file from Linux server to windows os, open the file i get non-ascii character to be ??. The copyright character get ??. Do i do anything wrong, or can it bee that im missing some lib for the redhad distribution?