Java I18N Questions

Question

Hello,
I've come across a problem trying to internationalize my program (web application, spring). I've successfully be able use UTF-8 encoding to add french characters, however I'm running into an issue with Japanese (multi-byte) characters.
I've been searching but I haven't been able to find a definitive answer on this. I have some xml files that contain my spring beans. In these beans I have japanese characters - for some reason I cannot get these loaded into my application. I always get an invalid byte 2 of 3 error.
I have two theories:
1. I think that all non-latin languages should be stored xml files as \uddd notation rather than japanese. I'm not sure if this is a limitation of Java, because I am able to read japanese characters (from file) from a test program.
2. It must be some way I am reading in the xml files. I have looked for references to obvious classes like fileReader (that use the default encoding). But if this is the case, wouldn't the french characters fail?
Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

I think I found something related to my issue:
From another forum:
The thing about such documents is that there's nothing inside them to tell a reader what encoding they are in. In fact, if it contains only Latin characters (as your test file does), a file "encoded" in UTF-8 will be byte-for-byte indentical to the same text endcoded in most other common encodings.
The file only becomes different in the way non-Latin characters are translated into bytes. Even then the reader has to be told what the encoding is, it can't determine it from the file content.
I noticed that I was using fileReader which doesn't allow to specify encoding, but once I changed this to FileInputStream it fails on the French!
FileInputStream fr = new FileInputStream(fileAbsolutePath);
nputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(fr, "UTF-8");
InputSource inputSource = new InputSource(isr);
inputSource.setEncoding("UTF-8");The above code fails on my french xml file
Message was edited by:
jdinh