Printing out unicode from Java code issue in windows console

Question

I have got a problem with printing out a unicode symbol in the windows console.

Here's the java code that prints out the unicode symbol value;

System.out.print("u22A2 ");

The problem doesn't exist when I run the program in Eclipse with encoding settings as UTF-8, however when it comes to windows console the symbol gets replaced by a question mark.

The following was done to try overcome this problem, with no success;

• Change the font of windows console to Lucida Console.

• Every time I run windows console I will change the encoding settings, i.e. with the use of chcp 65001

An extra step I've tried a few times was running the java file with an argument, i.e. java -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 Filter (where "Filter" is name of the class)

Answer 1

By default, the code-page using in the CMD of Windows is 437. You can test by run this command in the prompt:

C:>chcp
Active code page: 437

And, this code-page prevent you from showing Unicode characters properly! You have to change code page to 65001 AND using -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 for that purpose.

C:>chcp 65001
Active code page: 65001
C:>java -jar -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 path/to/your/runnable/jar