Encoding Problem in solaris

Question

I generated a document in a solaris machine which follows the encoding scheme "ISO-8859-1". This document contains symbols such as British currency pound symbols.
Now, I am passing this document as an input to my application. My application runs on another machine which follows "US-ASCII 7bit" encoding scheme. Here, the input file undergoes some processing by my application and when I see the file now, the British currency pound symbols is converted to question marks.
To stop this, can I use the -Dfile.encoding option as
java -Dfile.encoding=ISO-8859-1 -classpath.......
Is the format right? will I get any problem changing the format? once I complete running my application will the encoding scheme revert back to the the default one?
Thanks
Shiv

Answer 1

That should be fine but you should avoid setting file.encoding for reading only one file. What will you do when your program grows and needs to communicate with the system using the system's own default character encoding? It's better to set the encoding in the program itself, like this:final String ENCODING = "ISO-8859-1";
Reader in = new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(file), ENCODING);The encoding does not have to be hardcoded, instead you could use System.getProperty("my.program.encoding", "ISO-8859-1") or what ever.