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in reply to Reading russian characters

Also, find a way to look at (say in hexadecimal) what the actual bytes are, that are being rendered as "????" on output. (How are you generating that output? To the console; a web page?) Question-marks probably just mean a display-only issue: the bytes are there, and correct, but the system doesn't know what charset to use to display them. Could be that they're not there, though; that they've been corrupted earlier. Only one way to know for sure.

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Re^2: Reading russian characters
by afoken (Chancellor) on Nov 15, 2012 at 06:52 UTC

    I remember that I got a literal ? (chr 63) from a database whenever it had a character not representable by the current connection encoding. But I can't remember which database behaved like that.

    Java often also behaves like this. This is documented in http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/nio/charset/CharsetEncoder.html.

    Alexander

    --
    Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)