searching words starting with accent characters using UTF-8

Iam trying to search for words starting with accent characters.As posted in one of the Lucene user-list mail I tried using UTF-8 encoding String query = this.request.getParameter( "query" ); if( query!=null ) { query = new String( query.getBytes(), "UTF-8" ); } But this code is not working prope

io exception on recreating an index

I'm currently having a problem overwriting an old index. Every night, the contents of a database I'm using get updated, so the lucene indexes are also recreated every night. The technique I'm currently using is just to start a new index on top of the old one (IndexWriter writer = new IndexWriter(f