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Bug 335090

Summary: Change encoding of sources to UTF-8
Product: [RT] RAP Reporter: Ralf Sternberg <rsternberg>
Component: RWTAssignee: Project Inbox <rap-inbox>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3 CC: ruediger.herrmann
Version: 1.4   
Target Milestone: 1.4 M6   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:

Description Ralf Sternberg CLA 2011-01-22 10:40:43 EST 
The encoding of our source files is set to ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) on project level. This encoding affects not only Java files, but also other resources like JavaScript, CSS, etc.

We only have very few non-ASCII characters in our source files. I scanned all projects in our CVS and found only 14 files. Most of the occurrences are in comments, the rest are used for testing purposes. For the latter, Unicode is more flexible anyway, since Latin-1 is restricted to Western European languages.

I think it would make it easier for us and the community to handle encoding issues if we change our encoding to UTF-8 which can encode all Unicode characters and is the most widespread encoding today.
[1] http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/character_encoding/all

Note that *.property files are not affected by that change. These files are in Latin-1 by definition and Eclipse always handles *.property files as Latin-1, independent from project settings. The same applies to *.exsd and other XML files, their encoding is always derived from the content itself.
Comment 1 Ralf Sternberg CLA 2011-02-06 18:17:03 EST 
Changed encoding to UTF-8 on project level on all projects (except obsolete ones, except incubator) in CVS HEAD. Converted all non-ASCII source files to UTF-8 except property files and html files that identify themselves as iso-8859-1 (mostly about.html, package.html). Added property javacDefaultEncoding.. = UTF-8 to build.property files of all projects that contain Java source code.