Draft JEP: To use UTF-8 as the default charset for the Java virtual machine.

[Alan Bateman]

On 21/02/2018 13:41, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
> On 21 February 2018 at 13:37, Alan Bateman <Alan.Bateman at oracle.com> wrote:
>> The proposal is to eventually get to the point that the default charset
>> cannot be changed. It will take several releases to get there due to the
>> potential compatibility impact.
> This seems like a reasonable strategy to solve the problem.
>
> I also agree that all locations where a default charset is used need
> to have a method alongside that takes a CharSet, eg. FileWriter.
>
Good progress was made via JDK-8183743 [1] in Java SE 10 to add 
constructors and methods that take a Charset and eliminate the 
historical inconsistencies. The issue of legacy FileReader/FileWriter is 
linked from that JIRA issue.

-Alan

[1] https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8183743