Java, Ant error: unmappable character for encoding Cp1252

Question

I am using Java, Eclipse and Ant in my project. I had some Java code that I needed to edit and add some UTF-8 chars in them. Previously my build.xml had: And it worked fine. Now after adding those UTF-8 chars when I try to run, it throws "error: unmappable character for encoding Cp1252"

Could anyone please tell me what is the fix? I tried changing the encoding to UTF-8 and Cp1252 in the xml but with no luck.

I'm using JRE7, Eclipse Kepler and Ant 4.11.

Answer 1

This can be tricky simply changing the "advertised" encoding does not make up for the fact that there are bytes in the file that cannot be understood using a UTF-8 interpretation. In Ant you will need to update the javac task to add an encoding like, <javac ... encoding="utf-8">

Make sure that the file encoding in Eclipse is also UTF-8 because some cp1252 characters do not directly map into UTF-8 either. You will probably want to maintain your entire project using a single encoding. Otherwise the compiler will be seeing different encodings when it only expects one.

Answer 2

You can try to set the environment variable called ANT_OPTS (or JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS) to -Dfile.encoding=UTF8