Develop Reference

Which encoding for ProcessBuilder parameters

Using ProcessBuilder, I need to be able to send non-ASCII parameters to another Java program.
In this case, a program Abc needs to send e.g. Arabic characters to Def program through the parameters. I have control of Abc code, but not of Def.
Using the normal way of ProcessBuilder without any playing with the encoding, it was mentioned here, it is not possible. Def recieves question marks "?????".
However, I am able to get some result, but different encodings can be used for different scenarios.
E.g. I am trying all encodings to send to the recipient, and comparing the result of what is expected.
Windows, IntelliJ console:
Default charset: UTF-8
Found charsets: windows-1252, windows-1254 and windows-1258
Windows, command prompt:
Default charset: windows-1252
Found charsets: CESU-8 and UTF-8
Ubuntu, command prompt:
Default charset: ISO-8859-1
Found charsets: ISO-2022-CN, ISO-2022-KR, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15, ISO-8859-9, x-IBM1129, x-ISO-2022-CN-CNS and x-ISO-2022-CN-GB
My question is: how to programmatically know which correct encoding to use, since I need to have something universal?
In other words, what is the relation between the default charset and the found ones?
public class Abc {
private static final Path PATH = Paths.get("."); // With maven: ./target/classes
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
var string = "hello أحمد";
var bytes = string.getBytes();
System.out.println("Original string: " + string);
System.out.println("Default charset: " + Charset.defaultCharset());
for (var c : Charset.availableCharsets().values()) {
var newString = new String(bytes, c);
var process = new ProcessBuilder().command("java", "-cp",
PATH.toAbsolutePath().toString(),
"Def", newString).start();
process.waitFor();
var output = asString(process.getInputStream());
if (output.contains(string)) {
System.out.println("Found " + c + " " + output);
}
}
}
private static String asString(InputStream is) throws IOException {
try (var reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is))) {
var builder = new StringBuilder();
String line;
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
if (builder.length() != 0) {
builder.append(System.lineSeparator());
}
builder.append(line);
}
return builder.toString();
}
}
}
public class Def {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(args[0]);
}
}

Under the hood, what's actually being passed around is bytes, not chars. Normally, you'd expect the java method that ends up turning characters into bytes to have an overload that lets you specify charset, but, for whatever reason, it does not exist here.
How it should work is thusly:
You pass a string to ProcessBuilder
PB will turn that string into bytes using Charset.defaultCharset() (why? Because PB is all about making the OS do things, and the default charset reflects the OS's preferred charset).
These bytes are then fed to the process.
The process starts up. If it is java, and we're talking the args in psv main(String[] args), the same is done in reverse: Java takes the bytes and turns them back to characters via Charset.defaultCharset(), again.
This does show an immediate issue: If the default charset is not capable of representing a certain character, then in theory you are out of luck.
That would strongly suggest that using java to fire up java.exe should ordinarily mean you can pass whatever you want (unless the characters involved aren't representable in the system's charset).
Your code is odd. In particular, this line is the problem:
var bytes = string.getBytes();
This is short for string.getBytes(Charset.defaultCharset()). So now you have your bytes in the provided charset.
var newString = new String(bytes, c);
and now you're taking those bytes and turning them into a string using a completely different charset. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish with this. Pure gobbledygook would come out.
In other words, what is the relation between the default charset and the found ones?
What do you mean by 'found ones'? The string "Found charsets" appears nowhere in your code. If you mean: What Charset.availableCharsets() returns - there is no relationship at all. availableCharsets isn't relevant for ProcessBuilder.

One possibility is to convert your String to Unicode sequences string and then pass it to another process and there convert it back to a regular String. String of Unicode sequences will always contain ASCI characters only. Here is how it may look like:
String encoded = StringUnicodeEncoderDecoder.encodeStringToUnicodeSequence("hello أحمد"));
The result will be that String encode will hold this value:
"\u0068\u0065\u006c\u006c\u006f\u0020\u0623\u062d\u0645\u062f"
This String you can safely pass to another process. In that other process, you can do the following:
String originalString = StringUnicodeEncoderDecoder.decodeUnicodeSequenceToString(encodedString);
And the result will be that originalString will now hold this value:
"hello أحمد"
Class StringUnicodeEncoderDecoder could be found in an Open Source library called MgntUtils. You can get this library as Maven Artifact or get it on Github (including source code and JavaDoc). JavaDoc online is available here
This library and this particular feature is used and well tested by multiple users.
Disclamer: This library is written by me

Detect ETX characters using Java

We have a text file with multiples paragraphs each separated by
character ETX as shown in below image. The Java program should
read each paragraph and parse and the end of paragaraph should be
identified by ETX.
How to make Java recognize or detect the EXT character?

ETX is an ASCII character, designed to indicate the end of transmission.
It also has the unicode codepoint U+0003 and you can thus find it by searching your string for this codepoint. If you are working with 8-bit strings, search for "\x03".

String representation of ETX character is String.valueOf((char)3)
File file = new File("myfile.txt");
java.util.Scanner scanner = new java.util.Scanner(file);
String etx = String.valueOf((char)3);
scanner.useDelimiter(etx);
while (scanner.hasNext()) {
String paragraph = scanner.next();
System.out.println("Paragraph = " + paragraph);
}

char from ldap not displaying correctly in java

In the Eclipse Ldap Browser plugin, I see an attribute value that has a UTF-8 char (a lowercase n with a ~ above it). This is UTF char c3b1 or USC2 char 00F1 which I've read Java uses for its Strings. But when I print it out to the log file with the following code, it shows up as an uppercase A with a ~ above it, followed by a +/- symbol. All three output statements show the same thing.
while(allAttributes.hasNext()) {
LDAPAttribute attribute = (LDAPAttribute)allAttributes.next();
String attributeValue = new String(attribute.getStringValue());
byte[] attByteValue = attribute.getByteValue();
String utf8Str = new String( attByteValue, "UTF-8");
log.debug("attribute.getStringValue="+attribute.getStringValue());
log.debug("attributeValue="+attributeValue);
log.debug("utf8Str="+utf8Str);
boolean isValidUTF8 = Base64.isValidUTF8(attByteValue, true);
if (isValidUTF8) log.debug("string contains all valid UTF8 chars and UCS2 chars");
else log.debug("string contains invalid UTF8 char(s) or invalid UCS2 char(s)");
}
isValidUTF returns true so it seems there are no invalid chars. Any suggestions how to make it display correctly in the log?

java convert String windows-1251 to utf8

Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.println("Enter text: ");
String text = sc.nextLine();
try {
String result = new String(text.getBytes("windows-1251"), Charset.forName("UTF-8"));
System.out.println(result);
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
System.out.println(e);
}
I'm trying change keyboard: input cyrylic keyboard, output latin. Example: qwerty +> йцукен
It doesn't work, can anyone tell me what i'm doing wrong?

First java text, String/char/Reader/Writer is internally Unicode, so it can combine all scripts.
This is a major difference with for instance C/C++ where there is no such standard.
Now System.in is an InputStream for historical reasons. That needs an indication of encoding used.
Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in, "Windows-1251");
The above explicitly sets the conversion for System.in to Cyrillic. Without this optional parameter the default encoding is taken. If that was not changed by the software, it would be the platform encoding. So this might have been correct too.
Now text is correct, containing the Cyrillic from System.in as Unicode.
You would get the UTF-8 bytes as:
byte[] bytes = text.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
The old "recoding" of text was wrong; drop this line. in fact not all Windows-1251 bytes are valid UTF-8 multi-byte sequences.
String result = text;
System.out.println(result);
System.out is a PrintStream, a rather rarely used historic class. It prints using the default platform encoding. More or less rely on it, that the default encoding is correct.
System.out.println(result);
For printing to an UTF-8 encoded file:
byte[] bytes = ("\uFEFF" + text).getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
Path path = Paths.get("C:/Temp/test.txt");
Files.writeAllBytes(path, bytes);
Here I have added a Unicode BOM character in front, so Windows Notepad may recognize the encoding as UTF-8. In general one should evade using a BOM. It is a zero-width space (=invisible) and plays havoc with all kind of formats: CSV, XML, file concatenation, cut-copy-paste.

The reason why you have gotten the answer to a different question, and nobody answered yours, is because your title doesn't fit the question. You were not attempting to convert between charsets, but rather between keyboard layouts.
Here you shouldn't worry about character layout at all, simply read the line, convert it to an array of characters, go through them and using a predefined map convert these.
The code will be something like this:
Map<char, char> table = new TreeMap<char, char>();
table.put('q', 'й');
table.put('Q', 'Й');
table.put('w', 'ц');
// .... etc
String text = sc.nextLine();
char[] cArr = text.toCharArray();
for(int i=0; i<cArr.length; ++i)
{
if(table.containsKey(cArr[i]))
{
cArr[i] = table.get(cArr[i]);
}
}
text = new String(cArr);
System.out.println(text);
Now, i don't have time to test that code, but you should get the idea of how to do your task.

How to replace � in a string

I have a string that contains a character � I haven't been able to replace it correctly.
String.replace("�", "");
doesn't work, does anyone know how to remove/replace the � in the string?

That's the Unicode Replacement Character, \uFFFD. (info)
Something like this should work:
String strImport = "For some reason my �double quotes� were lost.";
strImport = strImport.replaceAll("\uFFFD", "\"");

Character issues like this are difficult to diagnose because information is easily lost through misinterpretation of characters via application bugs, misconfiguration, cut'n'paste, etc.
As I (and apparently others) see it, you've pasted three characters:
codepoint glyph escaped windows-1252 info
=======================================================================
U+00ef ï \u00ef ef, LATIN_1_SUPPLEMENT, LOWERCASE_LETTER
U+00bf ¿ \u00bf bf, LATIN_1_SUPPLEMENT, OTHER_PUNCTUATION
U+00bd ½ \u00bd bd, LATIN_1_SUPPLEMENT, OTHER_NUMBER
To identify the character, download and run the program from this page. Paste your character into the text field and select the glyph mode; paste the report into your question. It'll help people identify the problematic character.

You are asking to replace the character "�" but for me that is coming through as three characters 'ï', '¿' and '½'. This might be your problem... If you are using Java prior to Java 1.5 then you only get the UCS-2 characters, that is only the first 65K UTF-8 characters. Based on other comments, it is most likely that the character that you are looking for is '�', that is the Unicode replacement character. This is the character that is "used to replace an incoming character whose value is unknown or unrepresentable in Unicode".
Actually, looking at the comment from Kathy, the other issue that you might be having is that javac is not interpreting your .java file as UTF-8, assuming that you are writing it in UTF-8. Try using:
javac -encoding UTF-8 xx.java
Or, modify your source code to do:
String.replaceAll("\uFFFD", "");

As others have said, you posted 3 characters instead of one. I suggest you run this little snippet of code to see what's actually in your string:
public static void dumpString(String text)
{
for (int i=0; i < text.length(); i++)
{
System.out.println("U+" + Integer.toString(text.charAt(i), 16)
+ " " + text.charAt(i));
}
}
If you post the results of that, it'll be easier to work out what's going on. (I haven't bothered padding the string - we can do that by inspection...)

Change the Encoding to UTF-8 while parsing .This will remove the special characters

Use the unicode escape sequence. First you'll have to find the codepoint for the character you seek to replace (let's just say it is ABCD in hex):
str = str.replaceAll("\uABCD", "");

for detail
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
/**
* File: BOM.java
*
* check if the bom character is present in the given string print the string
* after skipping the utf-8 bom characters print the string as utf-8 string on a
* utf-8 console
*/
public class BOM
{
private final static String BOM_STRING = "Hello World";
private final static String ISO_ENCODING = "ISO-8859-1";
private final static String UTF8_ENCODING = "UTF-8";
private final static int UTF8_BOM_LENGTH = 3;
public static void main(String[] args) throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
final byte[] bytes = BOM_STRING.getBytes(ISO_ENCODING);
if (isUTF8(bytes)) {
printSkippedBomString(bytes);
printUTF8String(bytes);
}
}
private static void printSkippedBomString(final byte[] bytes) throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
int length = bytes.length - UTF8_BOM_LENGTH;
byte[] barray = new byte[length];
System.arraycopy(bytes, UTF8_BOM_LENGTH, barray, 0, barray.length);
System.out.println(new String(barray, ISO_ENCODING));
}
private static void printUTF8String(final byte[] bytes) throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
System.out.println(new String(bytes, UTF8_ENCODING));
}
private static boolean isUTF8(byte[] bytes) {
if ((bytes[0] & 0xFF) == 0xEF &&
(bytes[1] & 0xFF) == 0xBB &&
(bytes[2] & 0xFF) == 0xBF) {
return true;
}
return false;
}
}

dissect the URL code and unicode error. this symbol came to me as well on google translate in the armenian text and sometimes the broken burmese.

profilage bas� sur l'analyse de l'esprit (french)
should be translated as:
profilage basé sur l'analyse de l'esprit
so, in this case � = é

No above answer resolve my issue. When i download xml it apppends <xml to my xml. I simply
xml = parser.getXmlFromUrl(url);
xml = xml.substring(3);// it remove first three character from string,
now it is running accurately.