Why does this print a null?

Question

I have a snippet here that prints one row from a derby DB. The heading row works fine.
I
            while (!cells[0].isEmpty()) {
                for (int col = 0; col < colNames.length; col++) //System.out.print(cells[col].remove(0).toString() + "\t");
                    queryResult += cells[col].remove(0).toString() + "\t";
                    //System.out.print(cells[col].remove(0).toString() + "\t");
                System.out.println("");results to Output window are:
IDNUM        KANJI        KANA        ROMAJI        ENGLISH       
null1        &#24859;        &#12354;&#12356;        ai        love    I should mention that the string "queryResult" is passed out as a return value and printed to output (not shown).
Example 2, I do the same thing with a direct println to Output:
            while (!cells[0].isEmpty()) {
                for (int col = 0; col < colNames.length; col++) //System.out.print(cells[col].remove(0).toString() + "\t");
                    //queryResult += cells[col].remove(0).toString() + "\t";
                    System.out.print(cells[col].remove(0).toString() + "\t");
                System.out.println("");Results are:
IDNUM        KANJI        KANA        ROMAJI        ENGLISH       
1        &#24859;        &#12354;&#12356;        ai        love       
nullAgain we get a null, but this time its at the end!
Running the query in SQL using the Netbeans interface shows no null, nor does examining the table.
How am I introducing a null in here?
Thanks

Answer 1

I don't know, but the results are a little funky. Perhaps the query results contains some control characters, like a carriage return and a null-terminator (\r and \0)? You could check this by not printing the string, but by printing the ASCII code of each individual character.