Question

I am trying to read in some sentences from a file that contains unicode characters. It does print out a string but for some reason it messes up the unicode characters

This is the code I have:

public static String readSentence(String resourceName) {

    String sentence = null;
    try {
        InputStream refStream = ClassLoader
                .getSystemResourceAsStream(resourceName);
        BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
                refStream, Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
        sentence = br.readLine();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        throw new RuntimeException("Cannot read sentence: " + resourceName);
    }
    return sentence.trim();
}

Answer 1

The problem is probably in the way that the string is being output.

I suggest that you confirm that you are correctly reading the Unicode characters by doing something like this:

for (char c : sentence.toCharArray()) {
    System.err.println("char '" + ch + "' is unicode codepoint " + ((int) ch)));
}

and see if the Unicode codepoints are correct for the characters that are being messed up. If they are correct, then the problem is output side: if not, then input side.