NOTE: This is only guaranteed to work with the Sun JVM since this option is “an internal detail of Sun’s implementations”.

UPDATE 2014-11-12 6:22 PM: The real fix is to set the environment variable LANG to en_US.UTF-8 right before you start your JVM.

Is Unicode breaking in your application and you can’t figure out where? Maybe data from HttpClient is coming back mangled, maybe database queries via JDBC are having Unicode data replaced with question marks, maybe your protobufs are getting shredded, but somewhere something is eating your Unicode data and nothing you’ve tried fixes it. Well…

Did you know the JVM itself has a global Unicode setting specified by the -Dfile.encoding option? Most people I talked to didn’t know about it, myself included, when I ran into a Unicode issue on a project. After some great teamwork and research we found this option, set it, and everything started working again.

All we had to do was put -Dfile.encoding=UTF8 in the script that ran our JVM and everything was fixed but that was only a temporary fix. You really need to set LANG to en_US.UTF-8. If you want to play with it I created a test project on Github that is incredibly simple and shows the right and wrong settings and what they do to a simple trademark symbol. Otherwise, try this on your project and see if it fixes the issue.

Good luck!