Question

I have a java file in Eclipse that is in UTF-8 and has some strings containing accents.

In the java file itself, the accent is written and saved as é .
In the xml that is generated using velocity the é becomes é
In the pdf that is generated using fop and and an xsl template, the output is displayed as é

So this is probably an encoding issue and everything should be in UTF-8. What’s weird is that locally in my eclipse environment (windows) where I run the application, the whole process works and the correct accents é are displayed in the pdf.

However when the application is built with maven and deployed to a (unix environment) I see the problem described above.

Answer 1

Perhaps Eclipse is compiling the file with a different javac command line than Maven.

When you compile Java, you have to tell the compiler the encoding of the source files (if they contain non-ASCII characters and the default doesn’t work).

javac -encoding utf8 MyCode.java

I think the way to fix this in Maven is to add this to your pom.xml file:

<project>
  ...
  <properties>
    <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
  </properties>
  ...
</project>

(I got that from a Maven FAQ about a slightly different issue.)

You could instead avoid the encoding issue entirely by using ugly Unicode escape sequences in your Java file. é would become \u00e9. Worse for humans, easier for the toasters. (As Perlis said, “In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.”)