Setting the default Java character encodingHow do I properly set the default character encoding used by the JVM (1.5.x) programmatically? I have read that -Dfile.encoding=whatever used to be the way to go for older JVMs. I don't have that luxury for reasons I wont get into. I have tried: System.setProperty("file.encoding", "UTF-8"); And the property gets set, but it doesn't seem to cause the final getBytes call below to use UTF8: System.se
