Displaying Numeric Character Entities

Question

I�m having a problem displaying numeric character entities such as ��� (m-dash) in my Java application. I have noticed that some characters will show up correctly and some will not, for example �}� (Right curly brace) shows up just fine. I�m having the same problem with Japanese numeric character entities such as �式�. The encoding that is being used here is UTF-8.
I am reading the text that contains these entities from a XML file using the following code:
    DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
    dbf.setNamespaceAware(true);
    dbf.setIgnoringComments(true);
    dbf.setIgnoringElementContentWhitespace(true);
    try {
      FileInputStream fff = new FileInputStream(theFile);
      InputSource inSource = new InputSource(new InputStreamReader(fff,"UTF-8"));
      DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
      Document doc = db.parse(inSource);
    } catch (Exception e) {
      System.out.println("Exception: " + e);
    }Here is a simple example of an xml file.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<toc name="Course One" file="course1/toc.xml">
<topic name="Topic � One" file="course1/source/topic1.html"/>
<topic name="&#24335; (Japanese char)" file="course1/source/topic2.html"/>
</toc>When I print out the contents of the name attribute I get boxes (or a ?) in place of the character entity. Any help that can be offered here would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
David

Answer 1

I just realized that the entities that I put in my post were resolved by the browser, so they didn't show up as the actual numeric entity code as I intended, &#151; (& + #151;) for m-dash &#125; (& + #125;) for the curly brace and &#24335; (& + #24335;) for the Japanese character. The XML file looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<toc name="Course One" file="course1/toc.xml">
<topic name="Topic &#151; One" file="course1/source/topic1.html"/>
<topic name="&#24335; (Japanese char)" file="course1/source/topic2.html"/>
</toc>