Eclipse character encoding

Question

I am using Scanner to scan a .txt document in Java. However, when I open the .txt document in Eclipse, I notice some characters are not being recognized, and they are replaced with something that looks like this:

�

These characters won't even let me scan the file as

    while(scan.hasNext)

automatically returns false (if these characters are not present, then I can scan the document just fine).

So, how do I get Eclipse to recognize these characters so I can scan? I can't manually remove them because the document is quite large. Thanks.

Answer 1

If you need to change the character encoding for your entire Eclipse Workspace, go to Window -> Preferences. Then under General -> Workspace, change the 'Text file encoding' to the appropriate character encoding (in this case, UTF-8).

Answer 2

The file you are reading must be containing UTF-8 or some other encoding characters and when you try to print them on console then you will get some characters as �'. This is because the default console encoding is not UTF-8 in eclipse. You need to set it by going to Run Configuration -> Common -> Encoding -> Select UTF-8 from the drop down. Check below screenshot: