Unicode input in a console application in Java

Question

I have been trying to retrieve "unicode user input" in my Java application for a small utility snippet. The problem is, it seems to be working on Ubuntu "out of the box" which has I guess OS wide encoding at UTF-8 but doesn't work on Windows when run from "cmd". The code in consideration is as follows: ``` public class SerTest { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { testUnicode(); } public static void testUnicode() throws Exception { System.out.println("Default charset: " + Charset.defaultCharset().name()); BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in, "UTF-8")); System.out.printf("Enter 'абвгд эюя': "); String line = in.readLine(); String s = "абвгд эюя"; byte[] sBytes = s.getBytes(); System.out.println("strg bytes: " + Arrays.toString(sBytes)); byte[] lineBytes = line.getBytes(); System.out.println("line bytes: " + Arrays.toString(lineBytes)); PrintStream out = new PrintStream(System.out, true, "UTF-8"); out.print("--->" + s + "<----
")…

Accepted Answer

Some notes:

- `-Dfile.encoding=utf8` is not supported and may cause unintended side-effects:

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.

- The `Console` class will detect and use the terminal encoding but doesn't support 65001 (UTF-8) on Windows - at least, it didn't the last time I tried it

I believe that the correct, documented way to use Unicode with cmd.exe is to use `WriteConsoleW` and `ReadConsoleW`.

I wrote a couple of blog posts when I was looking at this:

- I18N: Unicode at the Windows command prompt

- Java: Unicode on the Windows command line

Unicode input in a console application in Java

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