Why aren't certain characters allowed?

Question

I was trying to do a simple system.out.println with several lines. What I was trying to do was display ASCII art, but it said that some characters were not allowed. Why is this and is there a way of getting around it?

Answer 1

Usually, if you try to display characters the console can't handle, you don't get exceptions, just garbage output like question marks or little boxes. The only way I can see this kind of program generating error messages is if you try to compile code containing string literals with unescaped backslashes or quotation marks in them, e.g.: System.out.println("/"\");{code} In that case, replacing the offending characters with Unicode escapes won't help: {code}System.out.println("/\u0022\u005C");{code} The Unicode escapes get replaced before compilation begins, so you would get the same errors.  No, the solution for that problem is simply to escape the problem characters with backslashes: {code}System.out.println("/\"\\");