silb / encoding-guard

Guards Java source code against accidental encoding conversions.

Encoding Guard for Java

Prevents accidental encoding conversions of Java source code by making it uncompilable if the encoding is changed.

Requires that the expected encoding of the source code is hard coded into your build script.

The current encoding of the source code is UTF-8.

Test it out as follows:

ant compile

Yields BUILD SUCCESSFUL.

Now convert the .java files encoding and try to compile (requires iconv on your path):

ant -DfromEncoding=UTF-8 -DtoEncoding=ISO-8859-15 switch-encoding
ant compile

Yields BUILD FAILED.

How it works

The compilation failure for the wrong encoding is provided by either:

• Making the character literal for € unrepresentable in the wrong encodings.
• Utilizing Java's requirement that all case statements within a switch statement must be unique.