Why does the string “¿” get translated to “¿” when calling .getBytes()

Question

When writing the string "¿" out using

System.out.println(new String("¿".getBytes("UTF-8")));

¿ is written instead of just ¿.

WHY? And how do we fix it?

Answer 1

You don't have to use UTF-16 to solve this:

new String("¿".getBytes("UTF-8"), "UTF-8");

works just fine. As long as the encoding given to the getBytes() method is the same as the encoding you pass to the String constructor, you should be fine!

Answer 2

You need to specify the Charset in the String constructor (see the API docs).

Answer 3

Try:

System.out.println(new String("¿".getBytes("UTF-8"), "UTF-8"));

You need to specify the encoding both when converting the string to bytes and when converting the bytes back to a string.

Answer 4

Sounds like the system console isn't in UTF-8