unicode characters appear as question marks in IntelliJ IDEA console

Question

I\'m trying to write unicode characters (♠) using System.out, and a question mark gets printed instead.

How can I have proper unicode characters displayed instead o

Answer 1

Go to Help > Edit Custom VM options... then add the following option:

-Dconsole.encoding=UTF-8
-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

I'm not sure if both are necessary but it worked for me. You need to restart IntelliJ for changes to be applied.

I had already tried changing every encoding setting in Intellij, setting those options in Gradle and changing the system encoding, this is the only one that worked.