Unicode source code: Umlauts don't work anymore

Question

So far, i was able to just type (german) Umlauts in my Java source code (String value like
String text = "�hnlich sch�nes �sterreich"; //sorry about the bad example  ;-)Now I switched my Java IDE (Eclipse) to store source code in UTF-8 Unicode. Since then, my text strings are not displayed as the original Text in Swing anymore (e.g. JTextField) - the Umlauts are replaced by (multiple) strange characters. I thought Java internally handles Unicode?

Answer 1

to my javac target and now it works. This is really
strange as the compiler should detect itself what the
source is encoded in (the Java API itself allows to
detect the encoding of a file, so why should the
compiler not be able to do this, to?)Not quite right, the compiler and Java API use the platform's default character encoding like has been mentioned earlier. There is no attempt whatsoever to detect the character encoding; the default is simply used. Now, on your system the default happens to not be UTF-8 while on other systems it is (such as on mine).
And like mentioned earlier, if you want to write code that can be transferred from one platform to another you should not hardcode non-ascii characters but use unicode escapes.