Jdbc Problem in ASCII characters

HI,
I need your advise on this. Im running a tomcat as a webserver, database is postgres . I used jdbc to connect my java program to the database. The connection was successful but upon displaying the contents on the browser the rs.getString(2) that extracts the 2nd column produced an error. I've check the table and found out that the column contains � character in which it should have that character cause it will contain the lastname. I think java does'nt recognize such char. Is there a class or method to pacify the situation.
Thanks