Java: How to detect (and change?) encoding of System.console?

Try the following command-line argument when starting your application:

-Dfile.encoding=utf-8

This changes the default encoding of the JVM for I/O operations.

You can also try:

System.setOut(new PrintStream(System.out, true, "utf-8"));

Epaga: have a look right here. You can set the output encoding in a printstream - just have to determine or be absolutely sure about which is being set.

import java.io.PrintStream;
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;

public class Test {
    public static void main (String[] argv) throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
    String unicodeMessage =
    "\u7686\u3055\u3093\u3001\u3053\u3093\u306b\u3061\u306f";

    PrintStream out = new PrintStream(System.out, true, "UTF-8");
    out.println(unicodeMessage);
  }
}

To determine the console encoding you could use the system command "locale" and parse the output which - on a german UTF-8 system looks like:

LANG="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=