why '?' appears as output while Printing unicode characters in java

Question

While printing certain unicode characters in java we get output as \'?\'. Why is it so and is there any way to print these characters?

This is my code

Answer 1

Java's default behaviour when reading an invalid unicode character is to replace it with the Replacement Character (\uFFFD). This character is often rendered as a question mark.

In your case, the text you're reading is not encoded as unicode, it's encoded as something else (Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 are probably the most common alternatives if your text is in English).