Is there a way to build UTF-8 source files using ant

Question

I have UTF-8 string literals hardcoded in my java files. Eclipse builds this application correctly, so resulting class files contains those strings in UTF-8. But If use ant build.xml, resulting class files contains strings with incorrect encoding.

I already tried adding encoding="UTF-8" to the javac task, but with no success.

How it can be fixed?

p.s. I know this is quite bad practice to have string literals hardcoded in the source files, but this is situation when I need it there, so please don't suggest to extract it to the resource bundle.

Any help is greatly appreciated

Are you sure your source files are stored in UTF-8? – Feb 10 '13 at 08:53 — , Feb 10 '13 at 08:53
Yes, I did a double check – Sergey Karpushin Apr 22 '13 at 05:39 — Sergey Karpushin, Apr 22 '13 at 05:39

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 10 '13 at 06:19

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Proper way is

<javac ... encoding="UTF-8" ... />

If in resulting class files strings are in incorrect encoding, it means that probably your source encoding is not UTF-8, or these files are compiled by some other javac task, not the one you modified.

answered Feb 10 '13 at 06:19

Mikhail Vladimirov

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I did it and did double check that sources is in UTF-8. It didn't help. And I have only one javac task in my ant file, so I don't think this is the reason. – Sergey Karpushin Apr 22 '13 at 05:37

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:18

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The encoding must match the encoding of the file. Your guess of utf-8 may not be correct. Please check other suitable encoding names like iso-8859-1.

Please check upvoted answers in How do I set -Dfile.encoding within ant's build.xml?

edited May 23 '17 at 12:18

Community

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answered Feb 10 '13 at 08:49

Jayan

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 22 '13 at 20:05

This is not actually an answer to original problem, but I don't want this question to be unanswered. Maybe moderators will decide to delete it. Anyway.

Looks like this is some kind of bug when using specific combination of ant, jdk, windows. I dug really deep and wasn't able to fix this in a let's say normal way.

So I decided to externalize string to properties file, which is anyway better practice...

Normally solution suggested by Mikhail Vladimirov should work fine, but not this time.

Is there a way to build UTF-8 source files using ant

3 Answers3