Converting \u00e0 to appropriate character.

Question

Dear Java folks,
I'm trying to import some Java source code produced on one system into another.
I have a zip file which contains some .java source files in which non-ascii characters have been converted to their equivalent Unicode string, for example:
String s1 = "\u00e0" ;
The original code looked like this:
String s1 = "�" ; <- that's an 'a' with an accent over it.
I'm reading the source code from a zip file using an InputStreamReader.
Is there any way to convert the "\u00e0" and other Unicode characters back into the correct characters as I read the zip entry?
fyi I'm running on WIndows XP and the original code is part of a Lotus Notes database. In Notes the characters look fine but when the code is 'exported' they get converted to \u00e0 by NOtes and there's not much I can do about that. Both the export and the import are running on the same computer.
TIA, Keith

Answer 1

If not, my next question is this, are there any
classes that will convert a Unicode escaped character
of the form \uxxxx to the appropriate Modified UTF-8
2,3 or 4 byte character required by Java?I have no idea what those last two lines mean. Which
part of Java is it that you think requires UTF-8
encoding? Certainly the compiler doesn't.To OP and to DrClap:
Indeed the compiler doesn't require UTF-8.
The compiler is perfectly happy accepting
either UTF-8 or \uxxxx.
However, the OP had lots of files (in UTF8 presumably) in Lotus.
When exported, Lotus turns the UTF8 into \uxxxx, which is very
hard for the OP to read on the screen.
So the OP wants to write a function that translates \uxxxx back into UTF8.
For example: whenever he sees \u05D0,
he would like to write out 2 bytes: 0xD7 and 0x90
(which is the UTF-8 encoding of the code point 0x05D0)
This way, when he loads the file in a text editor,
he would see the international character (rather than a obscure code like \u05D0)
To OP:
It's really simple. The conversion table is in the following link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF8
There are resources on that page on the encoding.
But here is a slightly more detailed peusodocode:
public void write(int n)
  byte b=(byte)(n&0xFF);
  output.write(b);
  // This output object must be a Stream, not a Writer.
  // Otherwise, Java will interpret the number as a character, and mess it up
Whenever you see \uxxxx
   First, convert xxxx as a hexadecimal number, and store into integer varabie n
   if (n<=0x7F) {
       write(n);
   else if (n<=0x7FF) {
       write(0xC0|(n>>6));
       write(0x80|(n&0x3F));
   else if (n<=0xFFFF) {
       write(0xE0|(n>>12));
       write(0x80|((n>>6)&0x3F));
       write(0x80|(n&0x3F));
   else {
       write(0xF0|(n>>18));
       write(0x80|((n>>12)&0x3F));
       write(0x80|((n>>6)&0x3F));
       write(0x80|(n&0x3F));
   }