By Xueming Shen The UTF-8 charset implementation, which is available in all JDK/JRE releases from Sun, has been updated recently to reject non-shortest-form UTF-8 byte sequences. This is because ...

Even though the introduction of Unicode technically solved this problem, you can still encounter situations in which some or all of your Unicode characters will not display properly in Java programs.

PlainText is a Java 1.4 graphical (GUI) application to convert Unicode characters to plain text characters, for example, to convert left and right quotation marks into plain quotes for web pages.

Character Map (Java) by Keith Fenske. Display and copy Unicode characters or glyphs in text fonts. - kwfenske/character-map-java ...

Note that the string UTF-8 is the Java way of specifying the charset; MySQL uses the string utf8. If changing charsets, you’ll have to compare what Java supports with what MySQL supports.

He gives vague warnings about Java's UTF-8 differing from that used in XML and that you have to write other programs specifically with Java compatability in mind when it comes to text.