macos - Java: How to detect (and change?) encoding of System.console?

Question

I have a program which runs on a console and its Umlauts and other special characters are being output as ?'s on Macs. Here's a simple test program:

public static void main( String[] args ) {
    System.out.println("h?h??ü?");
    System.console().printf( "h?h??ü?" );
}

On a default Mac console (with default UTF-8 encoding), this prints:

 h?h????
 h?h????

But after manually setting the Mac terminal's encoding to "Mac OS Roman", it correctly printed

 h?h??ü?
 h?h??ü?

Note that on Windows systems using System.console() works:

 h÷h÷?3?
 h?h??ü?

So how do I make my program...rolleyes..."run everywhere"?

Answer 1

Try the following command-line argument when starting your application:

-Dfile.encoding=utf-8

This changes the default encoding of the JVM for I/O operations.

You can also try:

System.setOut(new PrintStream(System.out, true, "utf-8"));