Passing “-J-Duser.language” into javac through ant to ensure compilation errors are reported in the correct language

Question

My PC is currently set up as Japanese for testing purposes. If my java project has a compilation error the message is reported in Japanese.

e.g. Compiling 1 source file to [...directory...] [...class...].java:172: シンボルを見つけられません。

I would prefer to see the errors in english.

Without using ant the fix for this is to use javac -J-Duser.language=en [..java files...] which makes javac give english error messages (the -J tells javac to pass the rest of the argument to java)

My question is: how do I pass this to ant [editted to remove options I tried that didn't work]

Answer 1

Try adding a <compilerarg> to your <javac> call. For example:

<javac srcdir="${src.dir}" destdir="${classes.dir}" fork="true">
    <compilerarg value="-J-Duser.language=en"/>
    <compilerarg value="-J-Duser.country=GB"/>
</javac> 

EDIT Fixed the arg values. Also, this only works if the compiler is forked; I updated the example to reflect that.