16-bit Character Output

Question

I'm trying to read and write 16-bit characters to a file. If i write a character such as (char)8226 I am able to read it back in from the file without any issue. However, if I write out and try to read (char)8227 it will be read in as (char)63. I noticed that 63 is a ? and 8227 is displayed as a ? when printed (and how it appears in the output file). It seems like any character that displays as ? will be read back in as a real ? with code 63. The reason for this question is because i am manipulating the characters on the bit level and the result is often one of these "invalid" characters.
So I guess I have two questions.
1) Why cant I write and then read these "invalid" characters properly. They seem to be just like the "normal" 16-bit characters so what makes them different?
2) Is there some way that I'm missing to write and read them properly or is there some kind of work around for this problem?
I would greatly appreciate any help on this topic.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Yes, by 16-bit character I do mean Unicode. My point is that the typical characters used like the alphabet and numbers are in the range of 0-127 but the characters im working with now are much higher than that.
It would make sense that encoding would be causing my problem but i dont know how to change the encoding since ive never needed to do it before. The only flaw in that conclusion is that it will read 8226, a 16 bit character, correctly.
Part of my problem here is that im not sure whether the error is in output or input (or both).
This is a little test i just ran. It creates a short string which includes two large characters, 8226 which gives me no trouble and 8227 which does cause a problem. You can see from the output that 8227 is the only character that is not read in correctly.
public static void main( String[] args )
{     try
     {     String str = "abc" + (char)8226 + "def" + (char)8227 + "ghi";
          PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter( "out.txt" );
          pw.write( str );
          pw.close();
          FileReader in = new FileReader( "out.txt" );
          char[] cbuf = new char[100];
          int read = in.read( cbuf );
          String inStr = new String( cbuf, 0, read );
          System.out.println( "Output\tInput" );
          for ( int j = 0 ; j < str.length() ; j++ )
          {     char c1 = str.charAt( j );
               char c2 = inStr.charAt( j );
               System.out.println( c1 + " " + (int)c1 + "\t" + c2 + " " + (int)c2 );
     catch ( Exception ex )
     {     ex.printStackTrace();
}Output is as follows:
Output     Input
a 97     a 97
b 98     b 98
c 99     c 99
� 8226     � 8226
d 100     d 100
e 101     e 101
f 102     f 102
? 8227     ? 63
g 103     g 103
h 104     h 104
i 105     i 105