Sun's javac and source file character encoding

Sometimes you may need to tell the Java compiler about the character encoding of the source files. For example, if an ISO-8859-1 encoded source file is compiled in a UTF-8 environment, any funny (non-ASCII) characters may become a problem.

This is an example of how you can tell Sun's javac about the source file encoding:

javac -encoding iso8859-1 <FILE PATH(s)>

(Without the encoding switch, javac uses your system's default encoding.)


This way, you can tell Sun's JVM to expect UTF-8 IO:

java -Dfile.encoding=utf8