Special Character not appearing

Question

Hi,
Im getting very strange error. Im pulling some content stored in Oracle through JDBC.
When im printing that content in log, few characters are appearing as "?" (Question marks).
When im printing that content on a JSP with following lines on top of JSP :
<%@page contentType="text/html;charset=utf-8" %>
Its appearing fine and no "?" mark is appearing on JSP.
I am using an HTML to TEXT converter that simply convert entire HTML content to Text.
This is how it function. "htmlstring" is the string that im fetching from DB.
ByteArrayInputStream ba = new ByteArrayInputStream(htmlstring.getBytes());
InputStream ts = new TagFilterInputStream(ba);
<<Now do ts.read() and remove entire HTML code>>
After this conversion when im printing same content on JSP, its appearing with "?" mark.
Can anyone tell me, why its happening?Because it wasn't when simply i was displaying content on JSP.
However when i introduced HTML to TEXT converter, it has started behaving like this.

Answer 1

It looks like you are experiencing a character encoding mismatch. You can have a different default character encoding that your browser uses and yet another encoding when you are doing the conversion.
Looks like you are doing your conversion with the UTF-8 encoding and then displaying it with yet another encoding. That is why you need to explicitly set your character encoding to UTF-8 so the characters are displayed properly.
You can either specify a character encoding in your page like you are doing or you can force your convereter to the character encoding of your choice, like ISO-8859-1, as follows:
htmlstring.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
Thanks,
Justyna