Stripping non text characters

Question

I am generating a fixed format file from data out of a MSSQL DB ( that i have read only permissions) that is an import file to another program ( which i also don't have access to source code) . My problem is that some of the DB data has non text characters which causes the program that is accepting the data to throw
java.io.IOException: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: The char '0x19' in 'whatEver String that has a bad character' is not a valid XML character
My solution was
     for( int i = 0; i < myString.length(); i++){
          b = (byte)myString.charAt(i);
          if( b > 31 && b <127)
          sb.append( blk.charAt( i));     
     }

Answer 1

Better solution: Get the encoding right. At some point your code (or some other application) does some conversion from binary (byte[]/InputStream/OutputStream/...) to text (char[]/Reader/Writer/String/...). That place does so incorrectly.
Find out the encoding of the binary data and apply that when transforming.
Read [this excellent introduction into Unicode|http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html].