Q:

  character not displaying correctly in Java

I have tried "&nbsp;&nbsp;" to display two spaces in a standard output Java String.  Trying System.out.println("__");   <---- (two spaces, but, obviously, it trims it down to one space, hence the underscore)
I imagine there is a way to escape the &nbsp;, but I can not figure it out nor find help online.  Searching for it is ironic because a lot of literal &nbsp;&nbsp;   show up.
Any help would be appreciated.
EDIT:
for (int j = 0; j < COLUMNS; j++)
  if (j < 10){
    r += "__";
  }

produces 10 spaces, not 20 like expected when printed 
sorry I am still new at formatting here

A:

&nbsp; is an HTML-specific encoding.
You were right first time - the Java string that corresponds to two spaces is simply two space characters, e.g.
String s = "  ";

The println() call that you tried ought to have worked.  What did you do that led you to believe it was trimmed down to a single space?  I think your problem is elsewhere...
EDIT:
Based on your code snippet - is COLUMNS 5, by any chance? :-)
EDIT AGAIN:
OK, if COLUMNS is 15 then this code will result in r having twenty spaces appended to it.  If you want to be really sure you can either step through in a debugger or put a logging statement above the r += line to see for sure how many times the statement is called.
Also have a look at how r is used later on before its output is printed to the place you're inspecting; perhaps its value is truncated at some point, either explicitly in Java or perhaps even implicitly (such as being stored in a database column that's 10 characters too narrow before being retrieved and displayed later).

A:

If you want a non-breaking space in your string, for whatever reason, you have to use the Unicode literal:
System.out.println("banana\u00A0phone");

