[MPH-87] help:effective-pom/effective-settings uses platform encoding and garbles non-ASCII characters, emits invalid XML

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.1.1
• Fix Version/s: 3.0.0
• Component/s: effective-pom
• Environment: Windows, MacOSX, Linux, Maven 3.0.4
• Assignee: Michael Osipov
• Reporter: Mirko Friedenhagen
• Created: 21/Mar/12 15:22
• Updated: 03/Mar/18 18:24
• Resolved: 03/Mar/18 16:37

Description

As stated in http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-guessing-no-ext-info XML files without a BOM and without a XML encoding declaration should read the XML as UTF-8.

help:effective-pom does use the platform encoding for writing the effective-pom without emitting an appropriate XML encoding declaration in the resulting XML file.

I have created a small sample project (available at https://github.com/mfriedenhagen/invalidpom, attached as ZIP) which will reproduce the issue.

While the parent pom (https://raw.github.com/mfriedenhagen/invalidpom/master/pom.xml) has a XML encoding declaration, https://raw.github.com/mfriedenhagen/invalidpom/master/child-invalid/pom.xml has none.

Now running:

mvn -s settings.xml -gs settings.xml clean validate

will produce an invalid character for the developer name "Jörg" in child-invalid.

Two workarounds are:

• to include a XML encoding declaration as done in child-valid.
• to use JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS on Windows as stated in http://stackoverflow.com/a/623036/49132
• to use MAVEN_OPTS=-Dfile.encoding=utf-8 mvn -s settings.xml -gs settings.xml clean validate.

Nonetheless I consider this a Major bug, as it clearly violates the recommendations of W3C.