Best practise for setting character encoding

[Luke Murphy]

Hi,
We always want UTF-8.
Is it better to set this as a system property passed to the JVM e.g.
-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

Or is it better to set it programmatically:

System.setProperty("file.encoding", "UTF-8");

And why?

Thanks.

[Eduardo Yañez Parareda]

It depends on your enviroment, I prefer to have it in a configuration file, then set it programmatically. That way you don't depend on Server Applications Admins, and it isn't hardcoded.