Japanese, Question Marks, Locales, Eclipse, and Windows XP ????

Question

Hello. I am having some issues localizing JSP to Japanese. I have read a lot of stuff on the topic. I have my .properties file in unicode with native2ascii, etc.
When I debug under Eclipse 3.0, I see the Japanese characters correctly displayed in my properties file and inside of strings internal to to the program. However, when I try to print them with a System.out.println, I get question marks (??????).
My reading tells me that the ???? indicate that the characters cannot be displayed. I am somewhat confused because in the same Eclipse context I can clearly see the Japanese characters in the debugging window.
Thus I am missing the part where I set my standard output to correctly display the characters like Eclipse is displaying them in windows other than the "Console" window.
My default encoding is CP1252. If I do something like:
out = new java.io.PrintStream(System.out, true, "UTF-8");
and print my unicoded resource from the bundle I get the UTF-8 character representation (��������������������������������������������). With System.out.println I get ?????
My first reaction would be that the Japanese fonts aren't on my system, but clearly they are as I can see them in other windows.
When I try to show a Japanese resource on the web page that is the result of the jsp file I get ????. I can display the same characters UTF-8 encoded in a php page.
Here is another example:
java.util.Locale[] locales = { new java.util.Locale("en", "US"), new java.util.Locale("ja","JP"), new java.util.Locale("es", "ES"),
new java.util.Locale("it", "IT") };
for (int x=0; x< locales.length; ++x) {
String displayLanguage = locales[x].getDisplayLanguage(locales[x]);
System.out.println(locales[x].toString() + ": " + displayLanguage);
displays:
en_US: English
ja_JP: ???
es_ES: espa�ol
it_IT: italiano
instead of the correct Japanese characters.
What's the secret?
Thanks.
-- Gary

Answer 1

What do you want to do exactly? 1. Making a window application? 2. Making a console application? 3. Making a JSP webpage?
1. If it's window application, there's nothing to worry about if you use Swing. But if you use AWT, it's time to switch to Swing.
2. If you're making console application, solution does exist as others had pointed out but you'd better forget it because no console in whatever platform supports Unicode (Linux xterm may be an exception? But it probably has font problem). So, even if you could display characters in your computer, the solution isn't universal. You can't ask your every user to switch system locale, install whatever font in order to display a few characters!!
3. If you're making JSP, I'd advise you to use UTF-8 in webpages. Most browsers nowadays (probably more than 90%) could support UTF-8. All you need is to add the following JSP headers to your every page:
<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=utf-8" %>
<%@ page pageEncoding="iso-8859-1" %>Now, your every out.println(s); will send the correct data to browser without the least effort from you. All conversions are automatic!
However, just to make things even surer, you could add this HTML meta header:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">You use Tomcat, right? I do, and I don't have any problem.
Last words:
But, if all you want to do with System.out.println is for debugging, you could use
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "your string here");But you'd better have Java 5, or at least 1.4.2, if you want to have everything displayed correctly.