Encoding issue on filename with Java 7 on OSX with jnlp/webstart

Question

I have this problem that has been dropped on me, and have been a couple of days of unsuccessful searches and workaround attempts.

I have now an internal java swing prog

Answer 1

EDIT: After experimenting with OS X some more I realized my answer was totally wrong, so I'm redoing it.

If your JVM supports -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 on the JVM command line, that might fix the issue. I believe that is a standard property but I'm not certain about that.

HFS Plus, like other POSIX-compliant file systems, stores filenames as bytes. But unlike Linux's ext3 filesystem, it forces filenames to be valid decomposed UTF-8. This can be seen here with the Python interpreter on my OS X system, starting in an empty directory.

$ python
Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Jul 31 2011, 19:30:53) 
>>> import os
>>> os.mkdir('\xc3\xa8')
>>> os.mkdir('e\xcc\x80')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
OSError: [Errno 17] File exists: 'e\xcc\x80'
>>> os.mkdir('\x8f')
>>> os.listdir('.')
['%8F', 'e\xcc\x80']
>>> ^D
$ ls
%8F è

This proves that the directory name on your filesystem cannot be Mac-Roman encoded (i.e. with byte value 8F where the è is seen), as long as it's an HFS Plus filesystem. But of course, the JVM is not assured of an HFS Plus filesystem, and SMB and NFS do not have the same encoding guarantees, so the JVM should not assume this scheme.

Therefore, you have to convince the JVM to interpret file and directory names with UTF-8 encoding, in order to read the names as java.lang.String objects correctly.