[Solved] Java Swing-GUI with international chars

[paddlaren]

Hi!

I'm currently working on a small project in Java with a Swing interface and it seems impossible to use the Swedish characters in the GUI. I cannot set labels in Swedish, I cannot do input in Swedish. This is a real pain for me.

I'm pretty sure that Java is able to deal with international characters and UTF-8.

For the moment I use Netbeans 5.5 as environment, though I have had this problem since NetBeans 3.something.

I have tried to open the file in kate and changed character encoding in the source file to utf-8 and iso-8859-1 with the result that the compiler warn me for converting the Swedish character to ASCII. Why the conversion to ASCII?
In some old java SDK i could tell the compiler, or was it the runtime, to use ISO-8859-1 enconding to get this stuff work.


Oh, by the way. I slightly remember this to be a nonproblem in MS Windows and thereby guessing the relation to settings in the operating system.

Anyone have any idea to solve this, or environment where this is not a problem?

// Erik

[paddlaren]

I tried this on a Kubuntu 6.10 system and Swedish ÖÄÅ seems to work nice. I notice that the encodeing seems to be UTF-8 as default on the Kubunut and I know from bitter experience that it is not that same in Kubuntu and Gentoo.

Will switch over to UTF-8 in Gentoo as a start.

[paddlaren]

This is amazing!
I followed the Using UTF-8 with Gentoo and it worked. It wasn't even hard to do and took less than an hour (compared to the hours I spent on this subject.....) A several years long keeping away from java is over!

The answer seems to be: to use international characters in Swing you must have an UTF-8 compliant desktop/system.

Hope this can be useful to others in the same need. We are quite some non-English-speaking using computers over the globe

// Erik