Question: I have the following String passed from another application.

```
2&#65533;4&#65533;9&#65533;

```

(2�4�9�)

I would like to remove question mark ascii characters from the above string.

How could I do this?

Answer: 
According to this [Unicode code table](http://unicode-table.com/fr/#specials), `&#65533;` (or `\ufffd`) **is** the character �.

You can remove this unicode character from your string with :

```
str = str.replaceAll("&#65533;", "");

```

But you should really try to understand *why* they are there.
```
string.replaceAll("\u0000.*","").replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]", "");

```

will remove the empty spaces & punctuation marks in the string variable.