StringBuffer class and Chinese character encoding

I have written a method to return a string containing Chinese characters.

public printChineseMenu(){
   StringBuffer buffer;
   buffer.append(chinese string returned from DB);     //chinese characters appear in SQL
   System.out.println(buffer);                         //they appear as question marks
   PrintStream out = new PrintStream(System.out, true, "UTF-8");
   out.println(buffer);                                //chinese characters appear

   return (buffer.toString())
}

Is there a better type to store/return a Chinese character string than StringBuffer class

Jon Skeet
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The problem here isn't StringBuffer - it's simply the encoding used by System.out. You'd find the exact same behaviour when printing the string directly, without using a StringBuffer.

StringBuffer (and its more modern, non-thread-safe equivalent, StringBuilder, which you should use instead) don't care about encoding themselves - they just use sequences of UTF-16 code units. They will correctly preserve all Unicode data. The same is true for String.

Your method should almost certainly just return a String - but if you don't need to do any "building" with the string (appending other pieces) then there's no point in using either StringBuffer or StringBuilder. If you do need to build up the reslut string from multiple strings, you should be fine to use either of them, and just return the result of toString() as you are already doing (although the brackets around the return value are irrelevant; return isn't a method).

Consoles can often be misleading when it comes to string data. When in doubt, print out the sequence of UTF-16 code units one at a time, and then work out what that means. That way there's no danger of encodings or unprintable characters becoming an issue.

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