Character encoding issues

The Eclipse Workbench is generally quite tolerant of character encoding, but the standard Java compiler, as used by Maven and the ToolTwist Controller, is not quite tolerant. If a file is in an inappropriate character format, non-ASCII characters often result in a compiler error. For example:

    [javac] /ControllerV8/launchpads/myrp-dev/image/extension-projects/myrp_t/src/com/myrp/util/MathUtil.java:67: error: unmappable character for encoding UTF-8
    [javac] 		lon2 = (lon2 + 3 * Math.PI) % (2 * Math.PI) - Math.PI;  // normalise to -180..+180�
    [javac] 		                                                                                  ^
    [javac] /ControllerV8/launchpads/myrp-dev/image/extension-projects/myrp_t/src/com/myrp/util/PaymentGatewayUtil.java:42: error: unmappable character for encoding UTF-8
    [javac] 	public static final String ERROR_EMAIL_SUBJECT = "MYRP Website cannot connect to Merchant Gateway � Severity 1";
    [javac] 	                                                                                                  ^

The solution to all these problems is to convert these files to UTF-8 format. One advantage of UTF-8 is that ASCII is a subset of UTF-8. In other words, a regular test file containing ASCII text, is already in UTF-8 format by default.

Determining the file format

On OSX and Linux systems, the encoding of a file can be determined using the file command:

file MathUtil.java
MathUtil.java: ISO-8859 Java program text

Converting on the command line

iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 MathUtil.java > ,new
mv ,new MathUtil.java

Converting within Eclipse

1. Open the file in Eclipse and copy the entire file into the cut&paste buffer ( Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C ).
2. Right click on the file in the Project Explorer and select Properties.
3. In the Resource section, under Text File Encoding, select Other and UTF-8 and press OK.
4. Replace the source code from the cut&paste buffer and save the file ( Ctrl-A, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-S ).

Note that simply changing the encoding will result in the non-ASCII characters being converted incorrectly.

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