Error when reading a XML File

Question

When I am reading an XML file in a folder I am getting extra characters like squares before and after each and every character of the XML file.
Why is this so.I thought they are spaces and trimmed it but i didnt work.I replaced thinking as escape characters and that also did not work.But when I am prionting the ASCII value of the first character of the file I am getting -17.
Please can anyone help me out of this.
Thanks,
Sravanthi

Answer 1

public class Example()
File file = new File("C:/SCTMUnZip/"+files);
System.out.println("Files inside the directory:::"+files[i]);
String filedata = getContentsofFile(file);
if(file.getName().contains(".xml"))
InputStreamReader reader = new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream("C:/SCTMUnZip/"+files[i]+"/"));
System.out.println("Encoding Style:::"+reader.getEncoding());
byte[] filebytes = filedata.getBytes("UTF-16");//byte[] utf8String = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(srcString);
System.out.println("This is a XML File...");
file1.setMStrFileName(files[i]);
file1.setMPFileData(filebytes);
//file1.setMStrFileName(files[i]);
/*Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("[^]");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(filedata);
String str = matcher.replaceAll("");
filedata = str;
System.out.print(str);*/
else
System.out.println("This is a normal file...");
file1.setMStrFileName(files[i]);
file1.setMPFileData(filedata.getBytes());
static public String getContentsofFile(File file)
StringBuilder filecontents = new StringBuilder();
try
BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file));
try
String line = null; //not declared within while loop
* readLine is a bit quirky :
* it returns the content of a line MINUS the newline.
* it returns null only for the END of the stream.
* it returns an empty String if two newlines appear in a row.
while (( line = input.readLine()) != null){
filecontents.append(line);
filecontents.append(System.getProperty("line.separator"));
finally {
input.close();
catch (IOException ex){
ex.printStackTrace();
return filecontents.toString();
The files in the folder are log.txt and output.xml(has UTF-16 as the encoding style in the first line).log.txt is read fine but output.xml is not.