Should source code be saved in UTF-8 format

Question

How important is it to save your source code in UTF-8 format?

Eclipse on Windows uses CP1252 character encoding by default. The CP1251 format means non UTF-8 charact

Answer 1

Eclipse's default setting of using the platform default encoding is a poor decision IMHO. I found it necessary to change the default to UTF-8 shortly after installing it because some of my existing source files used it (probably from snippets copied/pasted from web pages.)

The Java Language and API specs require UTF-8 support so you're definitely okay as far as the standard tools go, and it's a long time since I've seen a decent editor that did not support UTF-8.

Even in projects that use JNI, your C sources will normally be in US-ASCII which is a subset of UTF-8 so having both open in the same IDE will not be a problem.