Convertion from Unicode to UTF8

Question

I want to convert some string having Unicode chars into a string with UTF8 char. I used following code snippet:
try {
String str = new String(givenString);
String utfStr = new String(str.getBytes("UTF-8"), "UTF-8");
System.out.println("Converted:" + str + " to:" + utfStr);
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace(System.out);
I also tried :
Charset utf8Charset = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
CharsetEncoder encoder = utf8Charset.newEncoder();
CharsetDecoder decoder = utf8Charset.newDecoder();
ByteBuffer bbuf = encoder.encode(CharBuffer.wrap(givenString));
CharBuffer cbuf = decoder.decode(bbuf);
String dest = cbuf.toString();
When Java tries to encode Unicode to UTF-8 and it runs into an unknown character (typically a character that is in the High Ascii range) it substitutes it with '?' or some other wierd character.
How do I prevent this.

Answer 1

Where is this string coming from? Are you initializing it in your source code as a String literal? String str = "A�roport Princesse B�atrix"; If so, you need to make sure the .java file is saved in an encoding that can handle all of the characters. ISO-8859-1, windows-1252, and of course, UTF-8 will all suffice. You also need to make sure the compiler reads the source file with the correct encoding. For example, if you saved your source files as UTF-8, you would do this: javac -encoding UTF-8 *.java Finally, before you print the text to the console, you need to make sure the console is using an encoding that can handle it. On my WinXP box, the default encoding (or codepage, as they call it) for console windows is cp437, which doesn't support accented characters. You can change it with the "chcp" command, like so: chcp 1252 Unfortunately, chcp won't accept UTF-8 or any other Unicode encoding, but cp1252 can handle the accented characters in your string. Note that you don't need to specify that encoding in your code; the Java runtime detects it automatically.
>
If you see question marks or some other placeholder character when viewing output, that's probably because the terminal or whatever doesn't have the fonts available to render those characters.>
No, question marks always indicate an encoding problem. If the character is valid but the font lacks a glyph for it, it shows up as a little rectangle.