Scanner vs System.console( ).write( )

Question

I tried to print out a string that includes Spanish accents on the screen. I get different answer with the same input, but with different approaches.

My first appro

Answer 1

using the second method, the bytes of the String are input directly into the app. Using the first method, you are relying upon the Locale of the Scanner

see http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Scanner.html#useLocale(java.util.Locale)

Answer 2

Not an answer

You still need to check some things.

1. The java source encoding used by the java compiler must be the same as the encoding of the text/editor.

   • You can check this with a programmer's editor like JEdit or NotePad++.

2. Check the default encoding:

   • System.out.println(System.getProperty("file.encoding"));
   • Or add an extra encoding parameter to the Scanner constructor
   • The reason being, that often there is a method/constructor version without encoding where the default platform encoding is taken.

3. Redirect the System.out/console to a file.

   • In this case it suffices to write the string to UTF-8.

4. Try the real console, not that of the IDE.

   • The encoding of the IDE "console" may be configurable.

I find the behaviour puzzling. It would look as if the Scanner took a charset encoding UTF-8 and then had to write it to US-ASCII, so umappable characters are given by �. That cannot be. It looks like Scanner would be "buggy" - which I doubt.

Try dump the string:

for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); ) {
    int cp = s.codePointAt(i);
    System.out.printf(" %x", cp);
    i += Character.charCount(cp);
}
System.out.println();

---

(Normally not done)

System.setProperty("file.encoding","Windows-1252");