Java 8 RFR 8011194: Apps launched via double-clicked .jars have file.encoding value of US-ASCII on Mac OS X

[Brent Christian]

On 7/28/13 10:13 PM, David Holmes wrote:
> On 27/07/2013 3:53 AM, Brent Christian wrote:
>> Please review my fix for 8011194 : "Apps launched via double-clicked
>> .jars have file.encoding value of US-ASCII on Mac OS X"
>>
>> http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=8011194
>>
>> In most cases of launching a Java app on Mac (from the cmdline, or from
>> a native .app bundle), reading and displaying UTF-8 characters beyond
>> the standard ASCII range works fine.
>>
>> A notable exception is the launching of an app by double-clicking a .jar
>> file.  In this case, file.encoding defaults to US-ASCII, and characters
>> outside of the ASCII range show up as garbage.
>
> Why does this occur? What sets the encoding to US-ASCII?

"US-ASCII" is the answer we get from nl_langinfo(CODESET) because no 
values for LANG/LC* are set in the environment when double-clicking a .jar.

We get "UTF-8" when launching from the command line because the default 
Terminal.app setup on Mac will setup LANG for you (to "en_US.UTF-8" in 
the US).

-Brent