A technical blog post for a change:
I've been having a really frustrating problem with my development environment recently, something that I've encountered before but never really understood or resolved definitively either: character encoding in source files.
Thanks to this blog post I think I've finally got a handle on what is going on and why. Essentially I had assumed that it was something odd in my environment but I think it's down to the fact that developers using Windows aren't setting the correct, UTF-8, encoding in their files which is therefore causing the problems for me.
The ultimate solution seems to be to fix these files by converting to UTF-8 and re-committing but I also have the issue that Maven appears to be using ASCII encoding by default so I'm not entirely sure if converting to UTF-8 will fix things. Unless of course it is expecting UTF-8 and is converting to ASCII to compile and the error message I'm getting is misleading. Will experiment later.
Feel your pain. For me it was RSS feeds that contain accented characters and say they're UTF-8 but turn out to be different ISO 8859 character sets arbitrary selected by whatever authoring tool the content creator happened to be using. Bye-bye, a week of my time!
ReplyDeleteNot what I expected to be talking about in this sphere :)