Java Charset problem on linux

Question

problem: I have a string containing special characters which i convert to bytes and vice versa..the conversion works properly on windows but on linux the special character is not converted properly.the default charset on linux is UTF-8 as seen with Charset.defaultCharset.getdisplayName() however if i run on linux with option -Dfile.encoding=ISO-8859-1 it works properly.. how to make it work using the UTF-8 default charset and not setting the -D option in unix environment. edit: i use jdk1.6.13 edit:code snippet works with cs = "ISO-8859-1"; or cs="UTF-8"; on win but not in linux ``` String x = "½"; System.out.println(x); byte[] ba = x.getBytes(Charset.forName(cs)); for (byte b : ba) { System.out.println(b); } String y = new String(ba, Charset.forName(cs)); System.out.println(y); ``` ~regards daed

Accepted Answer

Your characters are probably being corrupted by the compilation process and you're ending up with junk data in your class file.

if i run on linux with option -Dfile.encoding=ISO-8859-1 it works properly..

The "file.encoding" property is not required by the J2SE platform specification; it's an internal detail of Sun's implementations and should not be examined or modified by user code. It's also intended to be read-only; it's technically impossible to support the setting of this property to arbitrary values on the command line or at any other time during program execution.

In short, don't use -Dfile.encoding=...

```
    String x = "½";
```

Since U+00bd (½) will be represented by different values in different encodings:

```
windows-1252     BD
UTF-8            C2 BD
ISO-8859-1       BD
```

...you need to tell your compiler what encoding your source file is encoded as:

```
javac -encoding ISO-8859-1 Foo.java
```

Now we get to this one:

```
    System.out.println(x);
```

As a PrintStream, this will encode data to the system encoding prior to emitting the byte data. Like this:

```
 System.out.write(x.getBytes(Charset.defaultCharset()));
```

That may or may not work as you expect on some platforms - the byte encoding must match the encoding the console is expecting for the characters to show up correctly.

Java Charset problem on linux

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