Setting the default Java character encoding

Question

How do I properly set the default character encoding used by the JVM (1.5.x) programmatically?

I have read that -Dfile.encoding=whatever used to be the

Answer 1

I have tried a lot of things, but the sample code here works perfect. Link

The crux of the code is:

String s = "एक गाव में एक किसान";
String out = new String(s.getBytes("UTF-8"), "ISO-8859-1");