Getting unicode values from System.in

Question

I have created a Scanner that gets input from System.in so that I can get input from the console.

Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in, "UTF-8");

When I do

String s = scanner.next();

and then input Слово דבר in the console, the value of the string becomes ???? ???.

The console is able to display Unicode characters, but why can't I read them?

Answer 1

It's not safe to assume System.in is UTF-8 encoded. See this question for some workarounds.

Answer 2

This is because System.in returns text in default encoding (your default encoding is evidently not UTF-8). This should work OK

Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);
String s = sc.next();
System.out.println(s);

And you can read your default encoding from Java

System.out.println(System.getProperty("file.encoding"));