Problem with UTF-8 japanese on Win XP

Question

Hi,
I have a Client/server application with a server coded in C++ and runing on HP workstation and the GUI in java runing in a web context via java webstart mechanism on PC machine with win XP sp2 OS.
when logging into the HP workstation in japanese SHIFT_JIS and downloading the application japanese Charcters are displayed correctly on my PC.
However when logging into the HP workstation in japanese with UTF-8 encodage and kaunching the application characters aren't displayed correctly only rectangle charcaters are displayed, when launching the GUI on HP workstation it displayed correctly.
Can any one help me to resolve this problem.
Regards,

Answer 1

Both SHIFT_JIS and UTF-8 are character encodings. SHIFT_JIS encodes a superset of JISX-0208 to double-byte codepoints and JISX-0201 to single byte codepoints. UTF-8 encodes all of Unicode.
The problem here is that you are relying on "default" encoding for a client-server application. This only works when the default encoding is the same on both ends.
Go through your code, looking for everywhere where you convert to and from Strings, including reading and writing to IO Streams, and replace the methods you are using with equivalent methods that let you specify an encoding.