how to read and store non-English character in java on windows os

Question

I am dealing with a Brazilian customer where the data is in Portuguese language.

My application is responsible to read the data through web-service calls and store it in our database. The issue that I am currently facing is the Portuguese characters are not getting identified as it is and is stored in my database as a special character.

I am using MySQL database with all tables configured as collation UTF-8. I tried manually inserting Portuguese character into my database and it worked. So I am suspecting its java who is converting the Portuguese characters into special character.

Also, my application is using Hibernate for database operations.

I am able to get the character as I see in logs and the issue reside while trying to store that data in database.

Eg: Original characters: Gerãt
    Database characters: Gerãt

What configurations or setting or changes I need to do to my database so that I can capture the data in Portuguese language as it is?

Answer 1

It may not be database issue, but an application configuration issue.

Few pointers to help :

• Check the webservice implementation if it can accept Portugese chars
• Check the encoding in your web container. For example Tomcat
• Add logs to find out where the Portugese chars are lost.

Hope it helps.

Answer 2

Try changing your hibernate configuration to:

<hibernate-configuration>
<session-factory>
<property name="connection.useUnicode">true</property> 
<property name="connection.characterEncoding">UTF-8</property>
<property name="connection.charSet">UTF-8</property>

If that doesn't work, try adding UTF-8 to your characterEncoding in your JDBC url.

Also, this question might help you: Cannot insert non latin symbols in MySQL

Answer 3

This worked in my case:

Add environment variable JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS instead of _JAVA_OPTIONS with value as

-Dfile.encoding=UTF8