> My issue with this is that you have now hard-coded the fact that everyone > else is going to use UTF-8.
Who is everyone else? I agree that I have hard-coded the use of UTF-8. On the other hand, I've merely codified an existing practice. Thus the issue is now exposed, the places the convention is used are defined. Once a consensus is reached, we can implement it with confidence. > way to fix the problem. I still contest that setting the desired encoding > (via the appropriate JVM property like Bill Slacum initial suggested) is the > proper way to address the issue. It is easy to do both. Create a ByteEncodingInitializer (or somesuch) class that reads the JVM property and defines a globally used Charset. The find those utf8 definitions and usages and replace them with the globally-defined value.
