Name: mf23781 Date: 11/26/98


If the following testcase is compiled on a Win32 system it will not run. I
believe (though I cannot verify) that it will fail on Solaris too:

------ cut here ----- Test.java -----
class Test
{
  public static void main(String args[]) {
     /* Should be able to load the class using both these methods */
     try {
        Class test = Class.forName("Test_\u00e9");
     } catch (Exception e) {
        System.out.println(e);
     }
     Test test = new Test_\u00e9();
  }
}

class Test_\u00e9 extends Test {
  public Test_\u00e9() {
     System.out.println("This is " + this);
  }
}
----- cut here ----- end of Test.java -----

The key point here is that it contains a class whose name includes a character
outside the standard 7bit ASCII set. In this case I have used the unicode
character \U00E9 which is a "lowercase e acute" -- a perfectly valid character
for class names and one that occurs in the standard Latin-1 character set
supported by the base Win32 codepage (and I believe the standard Solaris codepage).

A problem occurs because internally the JVM processes this classname as a UTF-8
encoded string and it is this UTF-8 form that gets passed into the function
"LoadClassLocally()" in classloader.c. This function simply takes the string
passed to it and tries to open class file using that name; clearly this will
fail as the actual class file on disk has the proper "e acute" character in its
filename not the UTF-8 encoding.

The obvious fix is for the "LoadClassFromFile()" function to map the UTF-8
classname it receives back to platform encoding before trying to open the file.
However there are a least two things to consider if this is done and I am not
in a position to determine the correct resolution.

1. During JVM initialisation the classes needed to map UTF-8 to local platform
   encoding may themselves not yet be loaded.

2. The initial classname passed from the JAVA command line does NOT get turned
   into UTF-8 form before being passed to the classloader - this is an incon-
   sistency in itself - and therefore, more by luck than design, this class
   file is currently found. However it still won't load as the name embedded
   in the classfile header is in UTF-8 form and so fails to match the actual
   class name causing the classloader to reject the class.


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