i think the problem is that java reads / writes in the computers encoding. so, if the file was made on a mac and is read on win java assumes it's encoded for/by win. unicode won't help you there as java does not attempt to detect the encoding (which would slow down every read/write process and detection might not even be possible in any case). i think internally java already uses unicode.

anyway here's what might work (more or less directly copied from processings source):

Code:

void setup (){
    String[] mytest = loadStrings("myMacFile.txt", "ISO-8859-1");
}

void draw (){
}

static public String[] loadStrings(File file, String _enc) {
    InputStream is = openStream(file);
    if (is != null) return loadStrings(is, _enc);
    return null;
}

public String[] loadStrings(String filename, String _enc) {
    InputStream is = openStream(filename);
    if (is != null) return loadStrings(is,_enc);

    System.err.println("The file \"" + filename + "\" " +
	  "is missing or inaccessible, make sure " +
	  "the URL is valid or that the file has been " +
	  "added to your sketch and is readable.");

    return null;
}

static public String[] loadStrings(InputStream input, String _enc)
{
    try {
	  BufferedReader reader =
		new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(input, _enc));

	  String lines[] = new String[100];
	  int lineCount = 0;
	  String line = null;
	  while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
		if (lineCount == lines.length) {
		    String temp[] = new String[lineCount << 1];
		    System.arraycopy(lines, 0, temp, 0, lineCount);
		    lines = temp;
		}
		lines[lineCount++] = line;
	  }
	  reader.close();

	  if (lineCount == lines.length) {
		return lines;
	  }

	  // resize array to appropriate amount for these lines
	  String output[] = new String[lineCount];
	  System.arraycopy(lines, 0, output, 0, lineCount);
	  return output;

    } 
    catch (IOException e) {
	  e.printStackTrace();
	  //throw new RuntimeException("Error inside loadStrings()");
    }
    return null;
}
 

all you should have to do is supply the correct encoding of the .txt file to the encoding-savvy loadStrings() ..

/F

that's because java does not recognize "Unicode" as an encoding .. it uses the default mac-encoding instead. have a look at the types:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/nio/charset/Charset.html

i guess you should try "UTF-8" (without the byte order mark) if you need to use unicode at all.

you can find the underlying systems charset with:
println( System.getProperty("file.encoding") );

F

Just an update the above doesn't work anymore with processing 0144 (at least) maybe is the moving to java 1.5

static public String[] loadStrings(File file, String _enc) {
   InputStream is = openStream(file);
   if (is != null) return loadStrings(is, _enc);
   return null;
}

Anyway just comment that part and you still should able to use that :]