Unicode bug fix cleanup

[whua-airbnb]

@airbnb/di

We have a bug that all the non-ascii unicode characters in our log files are converted into "?" since 08/05/2014. The problem was that when we convert String from/to byte[], we did not specify the character set (Charset) in our code. When the default Charset is not UTF-8, the non-ascii unicode characters are not handled correctly.

[krishnap]

It's hard to understand what changes have happened in this pom file due to re-formatting. Would it be possible to have it formatted like it was done originally so that diffs are visible properly?

[whua-airbnb]

I tried. However, in the old file most of the white spaces are tabs. I just replaced the tabs into spaces. Unfortunately diff does not pick the changes in a way that we want.

[krishnap]

Other than the minor cosmetic issue, the change looks good to me. Thanks for tracking down this tricky bug.

[brndnmtthws]

Minus some formatting stuff, looks good. 👍 merge away.

We can deploy this on Monday to one of the clusters, and let it bake.

[andykram]

Good find, but why not just run the app with -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8?

[whua-airbnb]

Hi Andy,
I still have not figured out why we run -Dfile.encoding=US-ASCII on 08/05/2014 yet. I assume there are some reasons. However, I think it is more reliable to specify the character set rather than depend on the default, since the default might change without informing us.

[andykram]

@whua-airbnb: I disagree. The way you specify file encoding is via -Dfile.encoding. We could make an alternate configuration flag, but that seems like a waste. There's no good reason for us to be running with -Dfile.encoding=US-ASCII, we should just switch it back.