Android displays text in wrong encoding after update to Java 8

Question

I've updated my project to SDK version 24 and Java 8 and encountered a strange encoding issue.

By some strange reason Android treats my hardcoded UTF-8 strings as Windows-1251 and thus the text is garbled.

Like this:

This is what I changed:

compileSdkVersion 24
buildToolsVersion "24.0.2"

compileOptions {
    encoding = 'utf-8'
    sourceCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
    targetCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
}

And what I've tried:

• changed encoding in Android Studio settings
• added compileOptions.encoding = 'windows-1251' and compileOptions.encoding = 'utf-8'
• added system variable JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS:-Dfile.encoding=UTF8

If I revert back to Java 7 everything is ok.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

This is a bug in Jack compiler, have a look at this post.

Jack has been using the default VM encoding, which on windows is windows-1252. So, your text is encoded with UTF-8 and decoded with windows-1252 by Jack compiler, and this is why they became garbled.

Until now, Gradle Plugin doesn't support an API to set the decode format, so we need to wait...

Answer 2

I had the same issue in Windows(but not Mac OSX). this line solve my problem(put it in gradle.properties of your project):

org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx4096m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

note that this part change encoding:

-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8