Runtime.exec() with language specific chars (umlauts)

Question

Hello,
my problem is as follows:
I need to run the glimpse search engine from a java application on solaris using JRE 1.3.1 with a search pattern containing special characters.
Glimpse has indexed UTF8 coded XML files that can contain text with language specific characters in different languages (i.e. german umlauts, spanish, chinese). The following code works fine on windows and with JRE 1.2.2 on solaris too:
String sSearchedFreeText = "Tür";
String sEncoding = "UTF8";
// Convert UTF8 search free text
ByteArrayOutputStream osByteArray = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
Writer w = new OutputStreamWriter(osByteArray, sEncoding);
w.write(sSearchedFreeText);
w.close();
// Generate process
String commandString = "glimpse -y -l -i -H /data/glimpseindex -W -L 20 {" + osByteArray.toString() + "}";
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(commandString);
One of the XML files contains:
<group topic="service-num">
<entry name="id">7059</entry>
<entry name="name">T&#195;&#188;rverkleidung</entry>
</group>
Running the java code with JRE 1.2.2 on solaris i get following correct commandline
glimpse -y -l -i -H /data/glimpseindex -W -L 20 {T&#195;&#188;rverkleidung}
--> glimpse finds correct filenames
Running it with JRE 1.3.1 i get following incorrect commandline
glimpse -y -l -i -H /data/glimpseindex -W -L 20 {T??rverkleidung}
--> glimpse finds nothing
JRE 1.2.2 uses as default charset ISO-8859-1 but JRE 1.3.1 uses ASCII on solaris.
Is it possible to change the default charset for the JVM in solaris environment?
Or is there a way to force encoding used by Runtime.exec() with java code?
Thanks in advance for any hints.
Karsten

Answer 1

osByteArray.toString()Yes, there's a way to force the encoding. You provide it as a parameter to the toString() method.