Java - Unable to read foreign characters

I have successfully used the ISO8859-13 character encoding before but this time it doesn't seem to be working.

Based on the web site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-13 it is a valid character.

These are the 3 characters stored in the file.
äää

Here is the code being used.

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;

public class ReadFile
{
    public static void main(String[] arguments)
    {
        try
        {
            File inFile = new File("C:\\Downloads\\MyFile.txt");
            if (inFile.exists())
            {
                System.out.println("File found");
                BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
                        new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(inFile), "ISO8859-13"));

                String line = null;

                while ( (line = in.readLine()) != null )
                {
                    System.out.println("Line Read: >" + line + "<");
                }
            }
            else
            {
                System.out.println("File not found");
            }
        }
        catch (IOException e)
        {
        }

    }
}

The output on both Windows and Linux with and/or without Eclipse is the same which is.

 Line Read: >?¤?¤?¤<

This previously worked for a number of other characters but why not for this?

There are many explanations possible for what you are observing. The two most likely ones, along with some code you can use to confirm that you've found the cause:

Option #1: Terminal issues

Maybe you are writing this to a terminal that either cannot render ä, or, there is a terminal transfer issue (terminals are, in the end, just a bunch of streams and pipes hooked together, they are bytes under the hood, so if one part of the process thinks all are agreed that all bytes are to be interpreted as UTF-8 encoded text, and another as ISO-8859-13 encoded, you get problems). Given that you see the exact same output on windows as on linux this is unlikely (it would be particularly likely if you are seeing this in the 'console' view in an IDE, or different outputs on different systems for the same code). If you want to test it, run instead: System.out.println("unicode codepoint of the first character: " + (int) line.charAt(0)); - this should print 228, which is the unicode codepoint for ä. If it doesn't, then you can be certain this isn't the (only) problem.

If this is it, the fix is to, well, use another terminal or mess with settings, I'd just ask another SO question and give plenty of detail on your setup (which OS, which terminal client, what does SET print, does the client have encoding options, etcetera).

Option #2: It's not actually ISO-8859-13

This, too, is simple to test: remark out your BufferedReader in = .... line and replace it with: System.out.println(new FileInputStream(file).read()); - this should print 228. If it prints anything else, your input file is not actually ISO-8859-13.

If this is it, find out what the encoding actually is and use that instead. For example, in UTF-8 encoding, ä would end up as 2 bytes in a file. That would already imply that your input file containing just äää and not even a newline afterwards is 6 bytes large (in ISO-8859-13, it would be 3), and that the raw bytes, as you read them with fileInputStream.read(), are, in order: 195 164 195 164 195 164. So, if you run the above code and it prints 195 instead of 228 - your input is probably in UTF-8; it's definitely not in ISO-8859-13.