Printing Unicode characters

Question

Hi all,
I am trying to print certain unicode characters to a file using this code:
import java.io.*;
public class Unicode{
     public static void main(String args[]) throws IOException{
          char[] c = new char[1];
          char ch= '\u0ce6'; //starting character
          File f = new File("c:\\UC.txt");
          BufferedWriter bf = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(f));
          while( ch < '\u0cef'){
               c[0] = ch++;
               bf.write(c, 0, 1);//write the character to a file
          bf.flush();
}All I can see in the file is '?????????'. I tried printing it to file as command prompt also showed the same thing. How can I see the Unicode characters of different languages? Do I need to set any char encoding using System properties?
Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Sigh there is no such thing as plain text.
You create a file with the platform encoding (read the API docu of the FileWriter). That platform encoding is probably not even able to represent all unicode characters (it's likely to be ISO-8859-1 or one of it's variants).
Then you open that file without specifying the character set (it's guessed, possibly wrong) and you don't see the expected output.
Read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html for an introduction into the beautiful world of unicode.