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How to handle  (object replacement character) in URL

Using Jsoup to scrape URLS and one of the URLS I keep getting has this  symbol in it. I have tried decoding the URL:
url = URLDecoder.decode(url, "UTF-8" );
but it still remains in the code looking like this:
I cant find much online about this other than it is "The object replacement character, sometimes used to represent an embedded object in a document when it is converted to plain text."
But if this is the case I should be able to print the symbol if it is plain text but when I run
System.out.println("");
I get the following complication error:
and it reverts back to the last save.
Sample URL: https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles%ef%bf%bc/
NOTE: If you decode the url then compare it to the decoded url it comes back as not the same e.g.:
String url = URLDecoder.decode("https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles%ef%bf%bc/", "UTF-8");
if(url.contains("https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles?/")){
System.out.println("The same");
}else {
System.out.println("Not the same");
}

That's not a compilation error. That's the eclipse code editor telling you it can't save the source code to a file, because you have told it to save the file in a cp1252 encoding, but that encoding can't express a .
Put differently, your development environment is currently configured to store source code in the cp1252 encoding, which doesn't support the character you want, so you either configure your development environment to store source code using a more flexible encoding (such as UTF-8 the error message suggests), or avoid having that character in your source code, for instance by using its unicode escape sequence instead:
System.out.println("\ufffc");
Note that as far as the Java language and runtime are concerned,  is a character like any other, so there may not be a particular need to "handle" it. Also, I am unsure why you'd expect URLDecoder to do anything if the URL hasn't been URL-encoded to begin with.

"ef bf bc" is a 3 bytes UTF-8 character so as the error says, there's no representation for that character in "CP1252" Windows page encoding.
An option could be to replace that percent encoding sequence with an ascii representation to make the filename for saving:
String url = URLDecoder.decode("https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles%ef%bf%bc/".replace("%ef%bf%bc", "-xEFxBFxBC"), "UTF-8");
url ==> "https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-emb ... contract-roles-xEFxBFxBC/"
Another option using CharsetDecoder
String urlDec = URLDecoder.decode("https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles%ef%bf%bc/", "UTF-8");
CharsetDecoder decoder = Charset.forName("CP1252").newDecoder().onMalformedInput(CodingErrorAction.REPLACE).onUnmappableCharacter(CodingErrorAction.REPLACE);
String urlDec = URLDecoder.decode("https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles%ef%bf%bc/", "UTF-8");
ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(urlDec.getBytes(Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
decoder.decode(buffer).toString();
Result
"https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles/"

I found the issue resolved by just replacing URLs with this symbol because there are other URLs with Unicode symbols that were invisible that couldnt be converted ect..
So I just compared the urls to the following regex if it returns false then I just bypass it. Hope this helps someone out:
boolean newURL = url.matches("^[a-zA-Z0-9_:;/.&|%!+=#?-]*$");

U+FFFD is not available in this font's encoding: WinAnsiEncoding

I'm using PDFBox 2.0.1.
I try to dynamically add some (user provided) UTF8 text to the form fields and show the result to the user. Unfortunately either the pdf library is not capable of properly encoding special characters such as "äöü"... or I was not able find any useful documentation that could help me with this issue.
Can someone tell me what is wrong with the given code sample?
try (PDDocument document = PDDocument.load(pdfTemplate)) {
PDDocumentCatalog catalog = document.getDocumentCatalog();
PDAcroForm form = catalog.getAcroForm();
List<PDField> fields = form.getFields();
for (PDField field : fields) {
switch (field.getPartialName()) {
case "devices":
// Frontend (JS): userInput = btoa('Gerät')
String userInput = ...
String name = new String(Base64.getDecoder().decode(base64devices), "UTF-8");
field.setReadOnly(true);
break;
}
}
form.flatten(fields, true);
document.save(bos);
}
And here the stacktrace of the error:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: U+FFFD is not available in this font's encoding: WinAnsiEncoding
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDTrueTypeFont.encode(PDTrueTypeFont.java:368)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDFont.encode(PDFont.java:286)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDFont.getStringWidth(PDFont.java:315)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PlainText$Paragraph.getLines(PlainText.java:169)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PlainTextFormatter.format(PlainTextFormatter.java:182)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.AppearanceGeneratorHelper.insertGeneratedAppearance(AppearanceGeneratorHelper.java:373)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.AppearanceGeneratorHelper.setAppearanceContent(AppearanceGeneratorHelper.java:237)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.AppearanceGeneratorHelper.setAppearanceValue(AppearanceGeneratorHelper.java:144)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PDTextField.constructAppearances(PDTextField.java:263)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PDAcroForm.refreshAppearances(PDAcroForm.java:324)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PDAcroForm.flatten(PDAcroForm.java:213)
my.application.service.PDFService.generatePDF(PDFService.java:201)
I also found those (related) issues on SO:
pdfbox: ... is not available in this font's encoding
But that does not help me choose the right encoding or how. IIRC Java uses UTF16 internally for character encoding why is the default not enough though?
Is that an issue of the PDF-document itself or the code I use to set it?
PdfBox encode symbol currency euro
Well its dynamic user input, so there are way to many things I would have to replace myself.
Thus, if the PDFBox people decided to fix the broken PDFBox method, this seemingly clean work-around code here would start to fail as it would then feed the fixed method broken input data.
Admittedly, I doubt they will fix this bug before 2.0.0 (and in 2.0.0 the fixed method has a different name), but one never knows...
Unfortunately I was not able to find this other setter method, but it might also be a different scope it does apply to.
EDIT
Updated example code to better represent the problem.

U+FFFD is used to replace an incoming character whose value is unknown or unrepresentable in Unicode compare the use of U+001A as a control character to indicate the substitute function (source).
That said it is likely that that character gets messed up somewhere. Maybe the encoding of the file is not UTF-8 and that's why the character is messed up.
As a general rule you should only write ASCII characters in the source code. You can still represent the whole Unicode range using the escaped form \uXXXX. In this case ä -> \u00E4.
-- UPDATE --
Apparently the problem is in how the user input get encoded/decoded from client/server side using the JS function btoa. A solution to this problem can be found at this link:
Using Javascript's atob to decode base64 doesn't properly decode utf-8 strings

Chinese character 数 encodes into too many bytes

I'm trying to encode some Chinese characters using the GB18030 cp in Java, and I ran into this character 数, which translates to "Number" in Google Translate.
The issue is, it's turning into 10 bytes (!) when encoded:
81 30 81 34 81 30 83 31 ca fd
import java.math.BigInteger;
import java.nio.charset.Charset;
public class Test3
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
String s = new String("数");
System.out.println( "source file: "+String.format("%x ",
new BigInteger(1, s.getBytes(Charset.forName("GB18030"))) ));
}
}
When I try to decode that using the GB18030, it results in ? characters appearing beside the Chinese Number character (??数). When I try to decode only "CA FD", the last two bytes from above, it correctly decodes to the character.
Google translate notes the above character is Simplified. My source file is also saved in UTF8.
I thought GB18030 has a max of 4 bytes per character? Is there any particular reason this character behaves so strangely? (I'm not Chinese, BTW)

The most likely things are either:
There's an issue with the encoding of your source file, or
You have "invisible" characters prior to the 数 in it.
You can check both of those by completely deleting the string literal on this line:
String s = new String("数");
so it looks like this (note I removed the quotes as well as the character):
String s = new String();
and then adding back "\u6570" to get this:
String s = new String("\u6570");
and seeing if your output changes (as 数 is Unicode code point U+6570 and so that escape sequence should be the same character). If it changes, either there's an encoding problem or you had invisible characters in the string prior to the character. You can probably differentiate the two cases by then adding back just that character (via copy and paste from this page rather than your previous source code). If the problem reappears, it's an encoding issue. If not, you had hidden characters.

UTF8 convertion for text obtained from internet

ElasticSearch is a search Server which accepts data only in UTF8.
When i tries to give ElasticSearch following text
Small businesses potentially in line for a lighter reporting load include those with an annual turnover of less than £440,000, net assets of less than £220,000 and fewer than ten employees"
Through my java application - Basically my java application takes this info from a webpage , and gives it to elasticSearch. ES complaints it cant understand £ and it fails. After filtering through below code -
byte bytes[] = s.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
s = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");
Here £ is converted to �
But then when I copy it to a file in my home directory using bash and it goes in fine. Any pointers will help.

You have ISO-8895-1 octets in bytes, which you then tell String to decode as if it were UTF-8. When it does that, it doesn't recognize the illegal 0xA3 sequence and replaces it with the substitution character.
To do this, you have to construct the string with the encoding it uses, then convert it to the encoding that you want. See How do I convert between ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 in Java?.

UTF-8 is easier than one thinks. In String everything is unicode characters.
Bytes/string conversion is done as follows.
(Note Cp1252 or Windows-1252 is the Windows Latin1 extension of ISO-8859-1; better use
that one.)
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(file), "Cp1252"));
PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(
new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream(file), "UTF-8"));
response.setContentType("text/html; charset=UTF-8");
response.setEncoding("UTF-8");
String s = "20 \u00A3"; // Escaping
To see why Cp1252 is more suitable than ISO-8859-1:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252

String s is a series of characters that are basically independent of any character encoding (ok, not exactly independent, but close enough for our needs now). Whatever encoding your data was in when you loaded it into a String has already been decoded. The decoding was done either using system default encoding (which is practically ALWAYS AN ERROR, do not ever use system default encoding, trust me I have over 10 years of experience in dealing with bugs related to wrong default encodings) or the encoding you explicitely specified when you loaded the data.
When you call getBytes("ISO-8859-1") for a String, you request that the String is encoded into bytes according to ISO-8859-1 encoding.
When you create a String from a byte array, you need to specify the encoding in which the characters in the byte array are represented. You create a string from a byte array that has been encoded in UTF-8 (and just above you encoded it in ISO-8859-1, that is your error).
What you want to do is:
byte bytes[] = s.getBytes("UTF-8");
s = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");

UTF-8 character encoding in Java

I am having some problems getting some French text to convert to UTF8 so that it can be displayed properly, either in a console, text file or in a GUI element.
The original string is
HANDICAP╔ES
which is supposed to be
HANDICAPÉES
Here is a code snippet that shows how I am using the jackcess Database driver to read in the Acccess MDB file in an Eclipse/Linux environment.
Database database = Database.open(new File(filepath));
Table table = database.getTable(tableName, true);
Iterator rowIter = table.iterator();
while (rowIter.hasNext()) {
Map<String, Object> row = this.rowIter.next();
// convert fields to UTF
Map<String, Object> rowUTF = new HashMap<String, Object>();
try {
for (String key : row.keySet()) {
Object o = row.get(key);
if (o != null) {
String valueCP850 = o.toString();
// String nameUTF8 = new String(valueCP850.getBytes("CP850"), "UTF8"); // does not work!
String valueISO = new String(valueCP850.getBytes("CP850"), "ISO-8859-1");
String valueUTF8 = new String(valueISO.getBytes(), "UTF-8"); // works!
rowUTF.put(key, valueUTF8);
}
}
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
System.err.println("Encoding exception: " + e);
}
}
In the code you'll see where I want to convert directly to UTF8, which doesn't seem to work, so I have to do a double conversion. Also note that there doesn't seem to be a way to specify the encoding type when using the jackcess driver.
Thanks,
Cam

New analysis, based on new information.
It looks like your problem is with the encoding of the text before it was stored in the Access DB. It seems it had been encoded as ISO-8859-1 or windows-1252, but decoded as cp850, resulting in the string HANDICAP╔ES being stored in the DB.
Having correctly retrieved that string from the DB, you're now trying to reverse the original encoding error and recover the string as it should have been stored: HANDICAPÉES. And you're accomplishing that with this line:
String valueISO = new String(valueCP850.getBytes("CP850"), "ISO-8859-1");
getBytes("CP850") converts the character ╔ to the byte value 0xC9, and the String constructor decodes that according to ISO-8859-1, resulting in the character É. The next line:
String valueUTF8 = new String(valueISO.getBytes(), "UTF-8");
...does nothing. getBytes() encodes the string in the platform default encoding, which is UTF-8 on your Linux system. Then the String constructor decodes it with the same encoding. Delete that line and you should still get the same result.
More to the point, your attempt to create a "UTF-8 string" was misguided. You don't need to concern yourself with the encoding of Java's strings--they're always UTF-16. When bringing text into a Java app, you just need to make sure you decode it with the correct encoding.
And if my analysis is correct, your Access driver is decoding it correctly; the problem is at the other end, possibly before the DB even comes into the picture. That's what you need to fix, because that new String(getBytes()) hack can't be counted on to work in all cases.
Original analysis, based on no information. :-/
If you're seeing HANDICAP╔ES on the console, there's probably no problem. Given this code:
System.out.println("HANDICAPÉES");
The JVM converts the (Unicode) string to the platform default encoding, windows-1252, before sending it to the console. Then the console decodes that using its own default encoding, which happens to be cp850. So the console displays it wrong, but that's normal. If you want it to display correctly, you can change the console's encoding with this command:
CHCP 1252
To display the string in a GUI element, such as a JLabel, you don't have to do anything special. Just make sure you use a font that can display all the characters, but that shouldn't be problem for French.
As for writing to a file, just specify the desired encoding when you create the Writer:
OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(
new FileOutputStream("myFile.txt"), "UTF-8");

String s = "HANDICAP╔ES";
System.out.println(new String(s.getBytes("CP850"), "ISO-8859-1")); // HANDICAPÉES
This shows the correct string value. This means that it was originally encoded/decoded with ISO-8859-1 and then incorrectly encoded with CP850 (originally CP1252 a.k.a. Windows ANSI as pointed in a comment is indeed also possible since the É has the same codepoint there as in ISO-8859-1).
Align your environment and binary pipelines to use all the one and same character encoding. You can't and shouldn't convert between them. You would risk losing information in the non-ASCII range that way.
Note: do NOT use the above code snippet to "fix" the problem! That would not be the right solution.
Update: you are apparently still struggling with the problem. I'll repeat the important parts of the answer:
Align your environment and binary pipelines to use all the one and same character encoding.
You can not and should not convert between them. You would risk losing information in the non-ASCII range that way.
Do NOT use the above code snippet to "fix" the problem! That would not be the right solution.
To fix the problem you need to choose character encoding X which you'd like to use throughout the entire application. I suggest UTF-8. Update MS Access to use encoding X. Update your development environment to use encoding X. Update the java.io readers and writers in your code to use encoding X. Update your editor to read/write files with encoding X. Update the application's user interface to use encoding X. Do not use Y or Z or whatever at some step. If the characters are already corrupted in some datastore (MS Access, files, etc), then you need to fix it by manually replacing the characters right there in the datastore. Do not use Java for this.
If you're actually using the "command prompt" as user interface, then you're actually lost. It doesn't support UTF-8. As suggested in the comments and in the article linked in the comments, you need to create a Swing application instead of relying on the restricted command prompt environment.

You can specify encoding when establishing connection. This way was perfect and solve my encoding problem:
DatabaseImpl open = DatabaseImpl.open(new File("main.mdb"), true, null, Database.DEFAULT_AUTO_SYNC, java.nio.charset.Charset.availableCharsets().get("windows-1251"), null, null);
Table table = open.getTable("FolderInfo");

Using "ISO-8859-1" helped me deal with the French charactes.