Unable to print ASCII codes

Question

Hello,
I am facing a problem in printing ASCII code between 128 and 159. these codes are displayed as '?'. All the other codes are printed correctly. Please let me know the reason behind this.
Given below is the code for the same
class Codes
     public static void main(String args[])
          short i = 165;
          for (i=0; i<=256;i+=5)
               System.out.println(i+" "+(byte)i+" "+(i+1)+" "+(byte)(i+1)+" "+(i+2)+" "+(byte)(i+2)+" "+(i+3)+" "+(byte)(i+3)+" "+(i+4)+" "+(byte)(i+4));
Waiting for a quick reply
rgds,
Sameer

Answer 1

1. What are the chars you are talking about? As already mentioned, they are control chars in unicode. What character encoding would you like to use, or in other words, what characters would you like to have for those bytes?
2. The character encoding of the dos console (Cp850 on the windozes I've used) is different from the system's default encoding (Cp1252, IIRC). This will cause problems if you want to print out text having non-ascii characters. For example System.out.println("&Aring;&Auml;&Ouml;") should print out the last three letters of the finnish alphabet but it prints something else instead. But if you write the text to a file it comes out as it should.
Another character encoding can be used by wrapping an OutputStreamWriter around System.out:
OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(System.out, "Cp850");
PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(osw, true);
out.println("&Aring;&Auml;&Ouml;");
Similarly, the input read through the standard inputstream in dos (the keyboard input or redirection using "<") is in another encoding and needs to be converted.