macos - java read write unicode / UTF-8 filenames (not contents)

Question

i have a few directories/files with Japanese characters. If i try to read a filename (not the contents) containing (as example) a ク i receive a String containing a ?. If i try to create a file/directory containing an ク a file/directory appears containing a ?.

As example: I list the files with.

File file = new File(".");  
String[] filesAndDirs = file.list();

the filesAndDirs array now contains the directories this the special characters. The String now only contains ????. It seams there is nothing to decode because the a getbytes shows only "-17 -65 -67" for every char in the filename even for different chars.

I use MacOS 10.8.2 Java 7_10 and Netbeans.

Any ideas?

Thank You in advance :)

Answer 1

Those bytes are 0xef 0xbf 0xbd, which is the UTF-8-encoded form of the ufffd character you're seeing instead of the Japanese characters. It appears whatever OS function Java is using to list the files is in fact returning those incorrect characters.

Perhaps Files.newDirectoryStream will be more reliable. Try this instead:

try (DirectoryStream<Path> dir = Files.newDirectoryStream(Paths.get("."))) {
    for (Path child : dir) {
        String filename = child.getFileName().toString();

        System.out.println("name=" + filename);
        for (char c : filename.toCharArray()) {
            System.out.printf("%04x ", (int) c);
        }
        System.out.println();
    }
}