Setting DEFAULT character encoding ???

Question

To set the default character encoding to UTF-8 for JVM I can do the
following on Solaris:
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8; java ....
How do I achieve the same on Windows?
Is there a java property where I can specify the default character
encoding or do I have to getBytes( str, "UTF-8") everywhere?
Thanks,
Artur...

Answer 1

Hi Artur,
there is a way. The property is file.encoding. Example:
import java.io.*;
public class ShowEncoding {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Default encoding: " +
        new InputStreamReader(System.in).getEncoding());
}On my system I get the following results:
java ShowEncoding Default encoding: Cp1252
java -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 ShowEncoding Default encoding: UTF8
java -Dfile.encoding=Latin1 ShowEncoding Default encoding: ISO8859_1I don't know, if setting this property using the -D argument is documented or implementation-independendent. But so far, it was working for me. For setting the locale, you may use the properties user.language and user.region. But this is undocumented and implementation-dependendent.
I wouldn't use these properties at all. I would rather specify the encoding in all constructors. Probably using an application property file.
Good luck!
Marcus.