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'm using Amazon (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk and successfully changed it to UTF-8.

In Elastic Beanstalk, go to Configuration > Software, "Environment properties". Add (name) JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS with (value) -Dfile.encoding=UTF8

After saving, the environment will restart with the UTF-8 encoding.