title: using java for Arabic NLP
body: <p>I'm working on Arabic natural language processing such as word stemming, tokenization etc.
  In order to deal with words/chars, I need to write arabic letters in java. So, my question is that is it a good practice to write arabic letters in java directly without encoding?
  example:
  which one is better:</p>
  
  <pre><code>if(word.startsWith("ت"){...}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>or </p>
  
  <pre><code>if(word.startsWith("\u1578"){...}
  </code></pre>