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

Do you have the appropriate fonts installed on your machine? The question mark appears when you don't have fonts for the characters you're outputting.

Also, are you outputting by doing a System.out.println("") ? If so, just installing the fonts should work.

If you are trying to write to System.out from within your program, that's different. You have to use an OutputStreamWriter, which is a character stream. You can't just write to a byte-oriented stream such as OutputStream.

Look up the API and class reference for OutputStreamWriter and subclasses such as PrintWriter. You construct it giving the locale of the constructor. For example,

PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(System.out, "UTF-8");