For i-o operations other than standard i-o statements (for example reading and writing an xml file using the XmlStream internal class) and for line sequential files managed by programs compiled with -flsu, the Java file.encoding setting is considered. This property is usually set in the command line. For example, to force UTF-8 as Java encoding for your program, you launch:

The Java file.encoding is also useful at compile time. If you have special characters in your source code and their ASCII value doesn’t match with the current operating system encoding, you should tell the compiler about it. For example, in order to compile a source written on Linux using UTF-8 on a Windows system where the system encoding is not UTF-8, you launch: