How to read and write a file in unicode?

Question

Hello!
I have a problem with reading and writing files which are saved in unicode. with my current code I get strange boxes in my text
Do you need a special Reader/Writer for this?
Please, help me if you have any ideas.
cheers
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
public class StreamConverter {
   static void writeOutput(String str) {
       try {
           FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("test_uni.txt");
           Writer out = new OutputStreamWriter(fos, "UTF8");
           out.write(str);
           out.close();
       } catch (IOException e) {
           e.printStackTrace();
   static String readInput() {
      StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
      try {
          FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream("file_uni.txt");
          InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(fis, "UTF8");
          Reader in = new BufferedReader(isr);
          int ch;
          while ((ch = in.read()) > -1) {
             buffer.append((char)ch);
          in.close();
          return buffer.toString();
      } catch (IOException e) {
          e.printStackTrace();
          return null;
   public static void main(String[] args) {
        String inputString = readInput();
        writeOutput(inputString);     
}

Answer 1

Are you saying there's only the three boxes at the beginning, and the rest of the text is okay? That sounds like a Byte Order Mark (BOM). The BOM is optional for UTF-8, but Java's I/O classes act like it's forbidden. They should check for it when reading so they can skip over it, but (for now, at least) we have to do that ourselves.
All you have to do is read the first three bytes from the InputStream and compare them to the BOM. If they match, you start reading the text from that position; otherwise you reset the InputStream and start reading from the beginning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark