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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T19:04:18+00:00

I came across two special characters which seem not to be covered by the

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I came across two special characters which seem not to be covered by the ISO-8859-1 character set i.e. they don’t make it through to my program.

The German ß
and the Norwegian ø

i’m reading the files as follows:

FileInputStream inputFile = new FileInputStream(corpus[i]);
InputStreamReader ir = new InputStreamReader(inputFile, "ISO-8859-1") ;

Is there a way for me to read these characters without having to apply manual replacement as a workaround?

[EDIT]

this is how it looks on screen. Note that i have no problems with other accents e.g. è and the lot…

enter image description here

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Both characters are present in ISO-Latin-1 (check my name to see why I’ve looked into this).

    If the characters are not read in correctly, the most likely cause is that the text in the file is not saved in that encoding, but in something else.

    Depending on your operating system and the origin of the file, possible encodings could be UTF-8 or a Windows code page like 850 or 437.

    The easiest way is to look at the file with a hex editor and report back what exact values are saved for these two characters.

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