Specifying source encoding for platform-independent builds

Let us put our learning of properties to practical use. You will have observed the following warning while building the simple project that we created in the Building a simple project with Maven recipe in Chapter 1, Getting Started.

[WARNING] Using platform encoding (Cp1252 actually) to copy filtered resources,
i.e. build is platform dependent!

Let us remove this warning if we really do not want the build to be platform dependent.

How to do it...

Let's specify the source encoding for platform-independent builds in our Maven project, by performing the following steps:

1. Open the pom file we created previously.

2. Add the following code:

   <properties>
         <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8 </project.build.sourceEncoding>
     </properties>

3. Run the following command:

   mvn package
   

4. Observe that the warning is no longer present.

How it works...

The project.build.sourceEncoding property explicitly specifies the encoding of the source...