How to convert string with ISO-8859-1 characters in Oct to normal form in Java

Question

I have string with ISO-8859-1 characters in Oct (\350, ...). How to convert them to normal form, for example "\350" -> "è" in Java?

Answer 1

Octal 350 is the proper code of è. Is this what your seeing in a console, or in a file that is displaying in a console? If so, I suspect the problem is with your terminal-emulator or console configuration. The text in the actual file or screen buffer is in iso-8859-1, your terminal simply can't display it so it write the octal equivalent.

Edit: I've been faced with similar sequences of characters showing up in files, and had stared for hour trying to figure out why they had been replaced in the file, and it turned out that they had not. It was the software that I was using to view the file that was doing the substitution. In my case it was putty. If you think this might be the case I recommend you do a hexdump on the file to verify.