Character encoding for French locale while creating PDF - Java

Question

I have a spring boot application which renders a XML document into PDF. The document contains French characters likeé à. While running the application through STS I have no issues the PDF is generated as expected. But while running the application through command line using java -jar target\application.jar the generated PDF has French characters as é Ã. I am converting the XML into byte[] and creating the PDF. I couldn't figure out a way out. Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

Two options:

1. Force the encoding with the file.encoding argument, such as -Dfile.encoding=utf-8.

   java -Dfile.encoding=utf-8 -jar target\application.jar
   

2. (better) When you convert the xml file into a byte array, specify the encoding:

   Reader reader = new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream("/path/to/xml/file"), StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
   // do your file reading ...