printout "�" turns to u`

[Daniel .J.Hyslop]

hi all,good day to you,

I have a sample of code here (printing the hole program would not solve this problem I fear),where I have a println statement Sys....tln("depositing �100.00") instead of the British currency pound sign being printed I get a u with an colon above it,could some explain what is happening

 
System.out.println("\nTest the deposit method in each class depositing �100.00\n");
 
         
        for(int lp=0;lp<currentArray1.length;lp++)
        {
            Class object = currentArray1[lp].getClass();
            System.out.println("\nClass name is " + object.getName() + " : ");
 
            System.out.println("the balance before deposit " + currentArray1[lp].getBalance());
 
            System.out.println("depositing �100.00 ");
 
            currentArray1[lp].deposit(100.00);
            System.out.println("balance now = "+currentArray1[lp].getBalance()+"\n");
        }

I also would like to be able to display the output from the getBalance statements with 2 digits after the point ie;�100.00 and not �100.00023.Could someone advise me to the easiest way to do this.

thankyou.

[Daniel .J.Hyslop]

I should also state that I am still using sdk 1.4 which does not support the printf(string,double)output stream for formatting numbers

[Ariel Ortiz]

I guess your problem with the pound symbol (�) is that you're running the application in a command line box (cmd.exe) in Windows. The problem is that the command line uses a different character set (IBM-PC OEM) than Windows (usually ISO-Latin1 in Western countries). So what you type in a your text editor or IDE does not necessarily show up the same in the console window. This is a problem that shows up quite often when we print message strings in languages other then English.

I can think of three possible solutions:

1. Use an other operating system such as Linux or MacOS X.
2. Have your output go to graphical component (such as a Swing JFrame) instead of the standard output in a console window.
3. Try using the IBM-PC OEM character code for the pound symbol in your string: System.out.println("\u009C");

About printing a numerical quantity with a fixed number of decimal digits, you can use the java.text.DecimalFormat class:

DecimalFormat nf = new DecimalFormat("$0.00");
double num = 12.3
System.out.println(nf.format(num));

Or, if you�re using Java 5.0, the new printf method comes in handy:

double num = 12.3;
System.out.printf("$%.2f", num);

I hope this helps.

...Ariel