title: Automatic Unicode string formatting in Java
body: <p>I just came across something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>String sample = "somejunk+%3cfoobar%3e+morestuff";
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Printed out, sample looks like this:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>somejunk+<code>&lt;foobar</code>>+morestuff</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>How does that work?  U+003c and U+003e are the Unicode codes for the less than and greater than signs, respectively, which seems like more than a coincidence, but I've never heard of Java automatically doing something like this.  I figured it'd be an easy thing to pop into Google, but it turns out Google doesn't like the percent sign.</p>