Thai language is not showing in Java output

Question

Unable to print Thai string value in Java console

public static void main(String [] args){
   String engParam = "Beautiful";
   String thaiParam = "สวย";
   System.out.println("Output :" + engParam + ":::" + thaiParam);}

Output is showing like:

Output :Beautiful:::à?ªà??à?¢

I think System.out.println will not be able to print the UTF-8 characters with default console settings. Is there any other way available to resolve this issue? help needed.

Answer 1

One cannot easily change a Windows' console encoding. So write to a .txt file. For Windows to detect the Unicode UTF-8 encoding, you could write at the beginning an invisible BOM character: "\ufeff".

String text = "\uFEFF" + "Output :" + engParam + ":::" + thaiParam;
Path path = Paths.get("temp.txt");
Files.write(path, Collections.singletonList(text)); // Writes in UTF-8

Answer 2

The problem in not in Java. When converted in UTF-8, the thai string "สวย" gives the bytes '0xe0', '0xb8', '0xaa', '0xe0', '0xb8', '0xa7', '0xe0', '0xb8', '0xa2'

In Latin1, 0xe0 is à, 0xaa is ª, oxa2 is ¢, and the others have no representation giving the ? characters.

That means that the println has done its part of the job but that the thing that should have displayed the characters (terminal screen or IDE) cannot or was not instructed to process UTF8.

---

Unfortunately, the Windows console is not really Unicode friendly. Recent versions (>= Win 7) support a so called utf-8 code page (chcp 65001) which correctly processes UTF-8 byte strings provided its underlying charset can display the characters. For example after typing chcp 65001 my French system successfully displays all accented characters (éèùïêçàâ...) when they are UTF-8 encoded, but cannot display your example Thai string.

If you need a truely UTF-8 capable console on Windows, you can try the excellent ConEmu.

Answer 3

You don't specify your environment, but this approach worked for me on Windows 10 from within my IDE, and also from the Command window:

• First, use a font that supports Thai characters. But also make sure that the font you choose can be set in the Command window, and not just within your IDE. Some can (e.g. Courier Mono Thai), and some can't (e.g. Angsana New). You can mess with the Registry to add font selections, but Courier Mono Thai was available by default, so I used that one.
• Once you have identified a font that you can set in the Command window, you can probably use that in your IDE as well if its default font(s) can't handle Thai characters.

Here are the steps to get things working:

• Download font Courier Mono Thai. You can download it from several web sites but I got it from here.
• Install the downloaded font. On Windows 10 all you have to do is select it (Courier_MonoThai.ttf) in File Explorer, right click, and select Install from the context menu.

• Once the font is installed, make it the default font in the Command window. Open a Command window, click the icon in the top right corner, select Properties and then select Courier Mono Thai as your font:

  

• Run the application in your IDE. If the source code or the output don't render the Thai characters correctly, change the font. I used Courier Mono Thai in NetBeans, and everything looked good:
• Finally run in the Command window. The Thai characters probably won't render correctly. To fix that just change the code page to the one that supports Thai (chcp 874) before running your application:

These instructions are specific to Windows 10. If you are running in a different environment update your question with full details of your platform and your IDE.

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Updated 12/15/19 to provide an alternative approach:

Instead of using Code page 874 (Thai) from the Command window, you could do this instead:

• Create a PrintStream that uses the UTF-8 charset, and write the output using that PrintStream.
• In the Command window, use code page 65001 (UTF-8).

Here's the code:

package thaicharacters;

import java.io.PrintStream;
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;

public class ThaiCharacters {

public static void main(String[] args) throws UnsupportedEncodingException {

    String engParam = "Beautiful";
    String thaiParam = "สวย";

    // Write the output to a UTF-8 PrintStream:
    PrintStream ps = new PrintStream(System.out, true, StandardCharsets.UTF_8.name());
    ps.println("UTF-8: " + engParam + ":::" + thaiParam);
}
}

And here's the output in the Command window, showing that:

• The Thai characters are not rendered correctly when using the default code page (437), or the Thai code page (874).
• The Thai characters render correctly using the UTF-8 code page (65001):

Answer 4

This answer to a similar question might be your case, if you are using eclipse (but it can be almost the same in IntelliJ)

Answer 5

This answer assumes that:

1. You are using Windows.
2. The "Java console" you said is an invoke of Command Prompt (You may know nothing about this if you are using an IDE, but cmd and IntelliJ IDEA surely does, though I don't know whether Eclipse or other does).
3. My guess was right :-)

---

Go to Registry Editor (regedit), locate at "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor", create a REG_EXPAND_SZ named AutoRun with value chcp 65001. Then try again (no reboot required).

Actually, this is an example of creating and using an "initscript" for cmd.exe. It may be the way for us to change the de facto "default" console encoding to UTF-8 (codepage 65001) without changing too much of the system configurations.

To restore it, simply delete this specified value.

Answer 6

Set environment variable java_tool_options=-Dfile.encoding=utf8 in cmd use chcp 65001