Snippet templates that contain UTF-8 characters are corrupted on platforms with a non-UTF-8 default encoding

[RudiKlassen-zz]

Our documents or project is set as follows:

Build Management: Gradle
IDE project encoding: ISO-8859-1
Snippet file encoding: UTF-8
Configuration for MockMvcBuilders: snippets().withDefaults().withEncoding("UTF-8");

We generate the snippets via Spring MVC test.
If I check the contents of the snippets in the build directory after generation, the umlauts or certain special characters are broken there. For me it looks like the encoding configuration of the MockMvcBuilder is ignored and the project encoding is used. But this should not be the case.
(Or am I doing something wrong?)

[wilkinsona]

I can't tell if you're doing something wrong as I don't know enough about what you're doing. REST Docs could be causing the problem, or the problem could be happening before the request and response reach REST Docs. If you'd like me to spend some time investigating, please take the time to provide a complete and minimal sample that reproduces the problem.

[RudiKlassen-zz]

Hi @wilkinsona ,
i have just prepared a small sample project, which can be found here https://github.com/RudiKlassen/SpringRestDocsExampleProject

To reproduce the error, proceed as follows: (I used IntelliJ)

Test 1
Set the Project Encoding to ISO-8859-1
Run the JUnit test CrudControllerTest
Open build/generated-snippets/read/fullDocumentation.adoc

Result: In the document you can see that the inserted umlauts broke during the conversion.

Test 2
Change Project Encoding to UTF-8,
clean up the build directory an run the test again.

Result: The umlauts are now displayed correctly in the generated document.

However, as far as I understand it, this should not happen, because the snipping encoding is determined by the document settings in MockMvcRestDocumentation.There I set the encoding to UTF-8. But I'm not sure if it's my fault or a bug. Can you please take a look?

[wilkinsona]

Thanks for the additional information. The snippet encoding only affects the encoding used to write out the snippets. It does not and cannot affect the encoding of anything before it reaches the snippets. If you set your project's encoding to ISO-8859-1 and use UTF-8 characters in its source code, the encoding problem will have occurred before REST Docs is involved.