Understanding encoding

Hi all,

Part of my code have to send an email written in Spanish or Catalan, depending of language selected. Both languages have accents and other non-ASCII (7bit) printable characters. That's why I use Unicode to try to avoid printing wrong characters. This is the body (in spanish):

Code:

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String body = "Se ha recibido la respuesta a la solicitud de tasaci\u00F3n.\n" +
                                "Oficina: " + objDatosTasacion.getDatosOficina().getCentro() + "\n" +
                                "C\u00F3digo tasaci\u00F3n: " + codigoCompuesto + "\n" +
                                "Empresa: " + nombreTasadora + "\n" +
                                "Cliente: " + nombreCliente;

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To send email, this does not works:

Code:

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BodyPart texto = new MimeBodyPart();
texto.setText(new String(body.getBytes(),"UTF-8"));

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Which generates:

Quote:

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Se ha recibido la respuesta a la solicitud de tasaci?.
Oficina: 2400
C?igo tasaci?: 2400-03-00014
Empresa: Tinsa
Cliente: Pepito Gcia.

---

However, next code works, and print unicode characters successfully:

Code:

---

BodyPart texto = new MimeBodyPart();
texto.setText(new String(body.getBytes()));

---

I just wonder to know why first method does not works if I'm using UTF-8, which is a representation of Unicode, and the second one works. I need to understand how to deal with such characters, because they make me crazy ;)

The OS is IBM-AIX and Java file is created using vi. I'm not sure the encoding used to create java file by vi. Compiler is IBM-JDK 1.5.0.

Thanks a lot in advance,

Albert.