Handling special characters

[Subramanian Thiagarajan]

Hi

When i tried to encode the following character literal

" � " ,JVM takes it as unicode and internally converts to a different charset.
This char literal needs to be stored as it is.

Can anyone suggest how to handle this.

[Joseph Maddison]

Please give more detail regarding your problem, if my following guess is not the problem you are seeing.

I have successfully used Strings to contain binary data in a convenient (and Hash-able) form. I would not be able to use it in this manner if it was performing random substitutions. Perhaps you are using a FileReader/FileWriter when you should be using a FileInputStream/FileOutputStream? That would change the character data to UTF-Something or other.

from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/io/FileWriter.html
Convenience class for writing character files. The constructors of this class assume that the default character encoding and the default byte-buffer size are acceptable. To specify these values yourself, construct an OutputStreamWriter on a FileOutputStream.

Hope this helps,
Joseph