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I recall in earlier versions of netbeans I could expand the string variable and see the characters it's made up of. Now it appears as a Children.leaf node. See the characters I could see things the console prints as '?' but they are not shown in the debugger toString.
This is now configurable. Since usually one does not need to look into String's fields, they are not shown by default. Please go to Tools -> Options -> Miscellaneous -> Java Debugger -> Variable Formatters and uncheck Default CharSequence Formatter. Then String objects should be expandable.