Java - Error message showing question marks instead of characters

Question

$ javac Increment.java

Output:

Increment.java:6: ??: ?????
    System.out.println(++a++);
                          ^
  ??: ??
  ??:    ?
1 ???

here is the code

class Increment{
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    int a = 5;


    System.out.println(++a++);
  }
}

Does any one know what may be happening and how to fix it? Increment is just a class for testing so that a error will appear. I am running it in git-bash terminal, but I have tried it in cygwin terminal and windows's terminal as well. character-set is UTF-8.

I think you’ll need to provide some more information. Perhaps starting with the code of `Increment`. — achAmháin, Dec 14 '18 at 21:39
What you are running this command in will have an encoding, is it some kind of shell? — Tony Kennah, Dec 14 '18 at 21:41
What is that ++ before and after a, are you trying to increment a? — Shivaraj, Dec 14 '18 at 21:54
Why do you use git-bash instead of a regular shell, or even better, an IDE ? — Benoit, Dec 14 '18 at 21:55
@Shivaraj I did that because I want an error will appear so that we can see the error message is not displaying correctly — Kallzvx, Dec 14 '18 at 21:56
@Benoit I am new to programming and my teacher suggested me not to use an IDE — Kallzvx, Dec 14 '18 at 21:58
As far as I can see on my host, the error message does not even contain special characters. This should work as well for ASCII, UTF-8 or ISO8859 charsets. Something looks really broken with your terminal. — Benoit, Dec 14 '18 at 21:59
OK @Kallzvx but why specifically git-bash ? Why not the default terminal under Windows ? — Benoit, Dec 14 '18 at 22:10
@ Benoit I am more familiar with Bash, and it does not work in window's terminal as well, sorry for not adding it. — Kallzvx, Dec 14 '18 at 22:19

Vladimir L. · Accepted Answer · 2018-12-14T22:26:02.117

1

Most probably you have a national locale set up (e.g. Russian, Chinese or anything else) that makes the Java compiler to return nationalized error messages, but your terminal (cygwin) does not support the UTF-8 output or your system does not support UTF-8 locale.

As the quickest work-around you could switch java compiler to provide error messages in English:

$ javac -J-Duser.language=en Increment.java

edited Dec 14 '18 at 22:26

answered Dec 14 '18 at 22:09

Vladimir L.

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Java - Error message showing question marks instead of characters

1 Answers1