En-dash converts to hyphen when using Maven ScmProvider.list method

Question

The file object in Java is not supporting the character en-dash '–' (unicode \u2013). It is automatically converting the en-dash character to hyphen '-' (unicode \u002D).

I am using the ScmProvider.list method:

ListScmResult list(ScmRepository repository, ScmFileSet fileSet, 
                      boolean recursive, ScmVersion version) 

List each element (files and directories) of fileSet as they exist in the repository.

In File set, one of the items (SCM File) has the repo item with en-dash replaced with normal hyphen.

I am using Java version 1.6. Is there any limitation regarding this?

Answer 1

Do you mean that you think that java.io.File automatically translates the character \u2013 to a regular hyphen (code \u002D)? That's not true, at least not on my Windows 7 machine running Oracle Java 6 update 35.

I tried the following code. It creates two files, with different file names; one with the long dash, one with the regular dash.

new File("C:\\Temp\\Hello\u2013World").createNewFile();
new File("C:\\Temp\\Hello-World").createNewFile();

So, whatever you see happening is not caused by some automatic conversion or limitation in java.io.File.