Java compiler platform file encoding problem

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There are no such things like a a String that was encoded as ISO-8859-1 in memory. Java Strings in memory are always Unicode strings. (Encoded in UTF-16 (as of 2011 – I think it changed with later Java versions), but you don’t really need to now this).

The encoding comes only in play when you input or output the string – then, given no explicit encoding, it uses the system default (which on some systems depends on user settings).

As said by McDowell, the actual encoding of your source file should be matched by the encoding which your compiler assumes about your source file, otherwise you get problems as you observed. You can achieve this by several means:

  • Use the -encoding option of the compiler, giving the encoding of your source file. (With ant, you set the encoding= parameter.)
  • Use your editor or any other tool (like recode) to change the encoding of your file to the compiler default.
  • use native2ascii (with the right -encoding option) to translate your source file to ASCII with \uXXXX-escapes.

In the last case, you later can compile this file everywhere with every default encoding, so this may be the way to go if you give the sourcecode to encoding-unaware persons to compile somewhere.

If you have a bigger project consisting of more than one file, they should all have the same encoding, since the compiler has only one such switch, not several.

In all projects I had in the last years, I always encode all my files in UTF-8, and in my ant buildfile set the encoding="utf-8" parameter to the javac task. (My editor is smart enough to automatically recognize the encoding, but I set the default to UTF-8.)

The encoding matters to other source-code handling tools to, like javadoc. (There you should additionally the -charset and -docencoding options for the output – they should match, but can be different to the source--encoding.)

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