Introduction :
On one of my recent Java projects I had to work with a character encoding other than the default ANSI encoding. Thus, I managed to set up the database connection properly to use the required UTF-8 encoding, as well as handle the returned data correctly as UTF-8 in the Java code.
When I tried to output some of the data, for logging purposes, in the console, the output couldn’t not be read correctly. The first thought was to double-check the source code, connection properties etc, and despite the fact that everything looked just fine, the console output still was unreadable.
The default character encoding in Java for MAC OS X is MacRoman. The default font encoding on some other platforms is ISO-Latin-1 or WinLatin-1; unlike MacRoman, these encodings are subsets of UTF-8. Programs that assume that filenames can be turned into UTF-8 by just turning a byte into a char will cause problems in MAC OS X.
The simplest way to work around this problem is to specify a font encoding explicitly rather than assuming one. Specifying a font encoding besides UTF-8 and UTF-16 is not recommended.
After spending some time trying to find a relevant answer in google, i came to know that it was indeed in Eclipse, everybody knows Eclipse is an excellent IDE, however some of its preferences may not be that straight-forward. I stumbled upon the “Common” tab in the Configurations panel. And indeed this is where I found the answer to the encoding problem!
On one of my recent Java projects I had to work with a character encoding other than the default ANSI encoding. Thus, I managed to set up the database connection properly to use the required UTF-8 encoding, as well as handle the returned data correctly as UTF-8 in the Java code.
When I tried to output some of the data, for logging purposes, in the console, the output couldn’t not be read correctly. The first thought was to double-check the source code, connection properties etc, and despite the fact that everything looked just fine, the console output still was unreadable.
The default character encoding in Java for MAC OS X is MacRoman. The default font encoding on some other platforms is ISO-Latin-1 or WinLatin-1; unlike MacRoman, these encodings are subsets of UTF-8. Programs that assume that filenames can be turned into UTF-8 by just turning a byte into a char will cause problems in MAC OS X.
The simplest way to work around this problem is to specify a font encoding explicitly rather than assuming one. Specifying a font encoding besides UTF-8 and UTF-16 is not recommended.
After spending some time trying to find a relevant answer in google, i came to know that it was indeed in Eclipse, everybody knows Eclipse is an excellent IDE, however some of its preferences may not be that straight-forward. I stumbled upon the “Common” tab in the Configurations panel. And indeed this is where I found the answer to the encoding problem!