Reading ASCII Encoding and Output

[Mike Askew]

Quite rare to see me post in the Java forum but have been picking it up as part of a long-distance university course I am doing.

I am currently trying to read in an ASCII coded .txt file and output it but am seeing some funny characters showing up.

The content is loaded using

        BufferedReader inputReader;

        System.out.println("Loading book...");

        try {
            inputReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(fileToRead), "ASCII"));

Which I then split on the new page character into book "pages".

When I come to print these out to console using

        try {
            PrintStream output = new PrintStream(System.out, true, "ASCII");

            for (String theWord : words) {

                output.println(theWord);
            }
        }

This: Sorrow came—a gentle sorrow—but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable
Comes as: Sorrow came???a gentle sorrow???but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable

NOTE: The dash is an em-dash

[Mike Askew]

Looking at this I may have to catch and manually convert them?

[JamesCherrill]

If you have an em-dash then the file is not ASCII encoded!
ASCII is a 7-bit code that includes only the english alphbet, numbers and a handfull of puctuation (not em-dashes), so any other characters will be unreadable when you specify ASCII as the character set.

Simply leaving out the character set will give you the default CharSet for your machine, which will work 95% of the time unless you are importing files from places with a different language.

Otherwize, you could try ISO-8859-1 (ISO Latin 1) or UTF-8

[Mike Askew]

You sir are a genious, I did misread which encoding it was using, UTF-8 being correct.

Running with my machine default char-set works fine.

[JamesCherrill]

No, no genius, just been doing it a long time...
(I started using Java when I still lived in Woodham myself - in the last century)

[Mike Askew]

Hehe, where did you move too?

[JamesCherrill]

France!

[Mike Askew]

Weather any better over there?

[JamesCherrill]

Everything is better over here, except for Indian take-aways. Been here 15 years and I'm not going back.