Hi. I have written a program that sends a request to the Yahoo API in several natural languages. The encoding on Yahoo has to be utf8. No problem in Delphi or Perl. In my Java version, I convert the search query sQuery1 like this: try{ utf8Bytes = sQuery1.getBytes("utf-8"); sQuery8 = new String(utf8Bytes, "utf-8"); } catch (etc.) Works fine when compiled from the command line. But when I type exactly the same code with Netbeans and run the jar, the Yahoo server sends an error message each time I use special characters like French accents (works fine for English though). Apparently, the jar compiled with Netbeans doesn't take the utf8 conversion into account. When run from Netbeans itself, the program works fine. Any explanation?