Setting the default Java character encoding

Question

How do I properly set the default character encoding used by the JVM (1.5.x) programmatically?

I have read that -Dfile.encoding=whatever used to be the

Answer 1

We were having the same issues. We methodically tried several suggestions from this article (and others) to no avail. We also tried adding the -Dfile.encoding=UTF8 and nothing seemed to be working.

For people that are having this issue, the following article finally helped us track down describes how the locale setting can break unicode/UTF-8 in Java/Tomcat

http://www.jvmhost.com/articles/locale-breaks-unicode-utf-8-java-tomcat

Setting the locale correctly in the ~/.bashrc file worked for us.