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

String symbol1="\u200d";
        StringBuilder strg = new StringBuilder("unicodecharacter");
        strg.insert(5,symbol1);
        System.out.println("After insertion...");
        System.out.println(strg.toString());

Output is After insertion... unico?decharacter

Answer 1

Here's a great article, written by Joel Spolsky, on the topic. It won't directly help you solve your problem, but it will help you understand what's going on. It'll also show you how involved the situation really is.

Answer 2

You have a character encoding which doesn't match the character you have or the supported characters on the screen.

I would check which encoding you are using through out and try to determine whether you are reading, storing or printing the value correctly.