Java 8 RFR 8011194: Apps launched via double-clicked .jars have file.encoding value of US-ASCII on Mac OS X (original) (raw)

Johannes Schindelin Johannes.Schindelin at gmx.de
Tue Jul 30 07:14:58 PDT 2013

Hi,

On Tue, 30 Jul 2013, David Holmes wrote:

On 30/07/2013 5:54 AM, Brent Christian wrote: > On 7/28/13 10:13 PM, David Holmes wrote: > > On 27/07/2013 3:53 AM, Brent Christian wrote: > > > Please review my fix for 8011194 : "Apps launched via double-clicked > > > .jars have file.encoding value of US-ASCII on Mac OS X" > > > > > > http://bugs.sun.com/viewbug.do?bugid=8011194 > > > > > > In most cases of launching a Java app on Mac (from the cmdline, or > > > from a native .app bundle), reading and displaying UTF-8 > > > characters beyond the standard ASCII range works fine. > > > > > > A notable exception is the launching of an app by double-clicking > > > a .jar file. In this case, file.encoding defaults to US-ASCII, > > > and characters outside of the ASCII range show up as garbage. > > > > Why does this occur? What sets the encoding to US-ASCII? > > "US-ASCII" is the answer we get from nllanginfo(CODESET) because no > values for LANG/LC* are set in the environment when double-clicking a > .jar. > > We get "UTF-8" when launching from the command line because the > default Terminal.app setup on Mac will setup LANG for you (to > "enUS.UTF-8" in the US).

Sounds like a user environment error to me. This isn't my area but I'm not convinced we should be second guessing what we think the encoding should be.

Except that that is not the case here, of course. The user did not set any environment variable in this case.

So we are not talking about "second guessing" or "user environment error" but about a sensible default.

As to US-ASCII, sorry to say: the seventies called and want their character set back.

There can be no question that UTF-8 is the best default character encoding, or are you even going to question that?

What if someone intends for it to be US-ASCII?

Then LANG would not be unset, would it.

Hth, Johannes

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