How can I change the Standard Out to “UTF-8” in Java

Question

I download a file from a website using a Java program and the header looks like below

Content-Disposition attachment;filename=\"Textkürzung.asc\";
         


        

Answer 1

The default encoding of System.out is the operating system default. On international versions of Windows this is usually the windows-1252 codepage. If you're running your code on the command line, that is also the encoding the terminal expects, so special characters are displayed correctly. But if you are running the code some other way, or sending the output to a file or another program, it might be expecting a different encoding. In your case, apparently, UTF-8.

You can actually change the encoding of System.out by replacing it:

try {
    System.setOut(new PrintStream(new FileOutputStream(FileDescriptor.out), true, "UTF-8"));
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
    throw new InternalError("VM does not support mandatory encoding UTF-8");
}

This works for cases where using a new PrintStream is not an option, for instance because the output is coming from library code which you cannot change, and where you have no control over system properties, or where changing the default encoding of all files is not appropriate.