Why does XStream not respect the encoding in the XML declaration?
XStream architecture is based on IO Readers and Writers, while the XML declaration is the responsibility of XML parsers. XStream all HierarchicalStreamDriver implementation respect the encoding since version 1.3, but only if you provide an InputStream. If XStream consumes a Reader you have to initialize the reader with the appropriate encoding yourself, since it is now the reader’s task to perform the encoding and no XML parser can change the encoding of a Reader and any encoding definition in the XML header will be ignored.
