That just shows what encoding is specified in the XML file. The more important question is: are you actually using that encoding for generating the file? If you're not explicitly specifying an encoding, then the platform default encoding is used - which on Unix is probably not ISO-8859-1.
Thats for this point. The code did not explicitly set an encoding hence it picked up the encoding set at the os level. In case of unix it was set to C(thus explaining why it was not working on the unix system).The windows system had the encoding set to Latin-1 (which was what I needed).
I modified the code to explicitly set the encoding and voila! it worked .
Thanks so much.