Comments on: Java Platform Encoding

By: Dominic Mitchell

Dominic Mitchell — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:23:35 +0000

I'm not entirely sure how filenames are interpreted. It may well be independent of sun.jnu.encoding. In an example I just concocted, it appears to always use UTF-8 for filenames on my mac.

By: John Dell'Aera

John Dell'Aera — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 02:31:27 +0000

For example, I can create files with Greek characters from a terminal via touch and all the UTF-8 characters are displayed correctly.

By: John Dell'Aera

John Dell'Aera — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 02:07:20 +0000

I have a java server app that creates UTF-8 file system names.
Unfortunately, when I look at the file names the non-ascii characters of the file names are displayed with ‘?’. How do I get the system to display the appropriate UTF-8 character?

System specs:
Linux CentOS 6.0 2.6.18.8-xenU #1 SMP Thu May 13 11:11:51 PDT 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Tomcat 6
Java 1.6

JAVA_OPTS=-Dsun.jnu.encoding=UTF-8
CATALINA_OPTS=-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_NUMERIC=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_TIME=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_COLLATE=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_MONETARY=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_MESSAGES=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_PAPER=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_NAME=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_ADDRESS=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_TELEPHONE=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_MEASUREMENT=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_IDENTIFICATION=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_ALL=

I even execute the following at startup:
System.setProperty(“file.encoding”, “UTF-8″);
System.setProperty(“encoding”, “UTF-8″);
System.setProperty(“user.language”, “en_US.UTF-8″);
System.setProperty(“user.country”, “en_US.UTF-8″);
System.setProperty(“sun.jnu.encoding”, “UTF8″);

And where I create the file:
fullPathName = new String(fullPathName.getBytes(“UTF-8″));
InputStream is = file.getInputStream();
input = new BufferedInputStream(is, STREAM_BUFFER_SIZE);
output = new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(fullPathName),
STREAM_BUFFER_SIZE);

// Read file from memory and write it to disk.
int r;
byte[] buf = new byte[STREAM_BUFFER_SIZE];
while ((r = input.read(buf)) != -1) {
output.write(buf, 0, r);
}

output.close();
output = null;
input.close();
input = null;

By: Jayesh Malondkar

Jayesh Malondkar — Thu, 19 May 2011 03:20:02 +0000

The above article was a life-saver for me. We were stuck in an issue where we were not able to set Encoding of the JVM inspite of overridding the LANG variable.
Thus, overridding the sun.jnu.encoding variable was the last resort. However, as rightly pointed out in the above artice, this variable is not well documented in the Java Documentation.

The fine research and detail explanation given by : Dominic Mitchell ; made my day.
Thanks a lot once again and keep up the good work.!!