Special Characters formatting in java

Question

My program is going through files and searches and replaces blah blah, problem is, the files are written in french, therefore there are special characters in the files. and it replaces them all with a ?. how would i make java recognize all these characters?
I made it so that when it searches line by line, it outputs the old line and the new line right under. and i checked the old lines and they have ? also. so its not my code, its java. But this only happens when java interprets the line, and the code makes java interpret all the lines, changes or no changes. But it doesn't make a difference because one way or another, java has to go through every line anyways.
So I was wondering if there would be a way to make java interpret the special characters, instead of having ? everywhere. Thanks

Answer 1

unless im putting it at the wrong spot......its right under the try...
for (int ii = 0; ii < pathfiles.length; ii++){
        String fileName = pathfiles[ii]; //name of file
     String fileName2 = pathfiles2[ii];
        BufferedReader inFile;
        PrintWriter outFile;
        try {
         System.setProperty ("file.encoding", "ISO8859-1");
            inFile = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(fileName),"UTF8"));
            outFile = new PrintWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream(fileName2), "UTF8"));
            String fileLine;
            //First we read the file into a string called contents
            while((fileLine = inFile.readLine()) != null) {//read one line at a time
                System.out.println("old "+fileLine);
                if (fileLine.matches("(?i).*"+searchString+".*")){//if match is found replace
                    int start = fileLine.indexOf(searchString);
                    fileLine = replace(fileLine, searchString, newString);
                System.out.println("new "+fileLine);
                outFile.write(fileLine);
            inFile.close();
            outFile.close();
        catch(FileNotFoundException e) {
            System.out.println(e);
        catch(IOException e) {
            System.out.println(e);
}