To be honest, I have never seen ?a? before. However, I found this on page 570 of Mughal and Rasmussen's "A Programmer's Guide to
Java Certification":
"Not all Unicode characters can be represented in other encoding schemes. In that case, the '?' character is usually used to denote any such character in the resulting output, during translation from Unicode."
Could this be what is going on in your example?
Anyone have any ideas?
Chris
[This message has been edited by Chris Cingrani (edited January 09, 2001).]