Work with locales and character encodings

 

Internationalization support for WAS relies on that provided by the Java™ 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE). Support varies by platform.

 

Procedure

• Verify that the operating system on which the appserver is installed supports the locales and encodings that you plan to use.

  Java internationalization support might use underlying services of the operating system. For example, if user IDs for your server are expected to contain non-English characters, make sure that the operating system is configured to process those characters.

• Plan for encoding changes as necessary.

  Consider differences in encoding support among operating system subcomponents. Although WAS and the Java platform are based on Unicode encoding, it is not always possible to run applications in a purely Unicode environment.

• Set the console.encoding property as necessary.

 

Results

If your application produces an UnsupportedEncodingException exception, check your operating system documentation to determine if the target operating system supports the required encoding and adjust the runtime environment as needed.

 

Example

For example, on the Windows^® platform, the command prompt runs in a Windows code page. Not all Windows code pages are supported by the Java platform, so it is possible to get a Java exception when running a command-line program, such as wsadmin, in an unsupported code page. To avoid exceptions, use the chcp command to explicitly set the code page to an encoding that is supported by the Java platform.

• Before command-line calls, change the code page.

  For example, Arabic code page 720 is not supported by the Java platform, but the Arabic code page for Windows (Cp1256) systems is. Type chcp 1256

• When starting a localized application from a command prompt, set the console.encoding property.

  For Arabic, pass the following parameter: -Dconsole.encoding=Cp1256

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Related concepts

Globalization

 

Related tasks

Task overview: Globalizing applications

 

Related Reference

Language versions offered by WAS
Globalization: Resources for learning