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

If you ultimately want to print a wide range of Unicode characters on a standard command line on Windows, there is a bit of work involved. The default raster font will not support the characters and applications usually need to call the Unicode console API to render them. Java does not - it will first encode the characters to the native character set (a lossy process) and then emit them using an ANSI call. You can read this blog post if you want the gory details.