Develop Reference

UTF-8 encoding CSV file

I have a CSV file, which using Excel to save as CSV UTF-8 encoded.
I have my java code read the file as byte array
then
String result = new String(b, 0, b.length, "UTF-8");
But somehow the content "Montréal" becomes "Montr?al" when save to DB, what might be the problem?
The environment is unix with:
-bash-4.1$ locale
LANG=
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_ALL=
BTW it works on my windows machine when I run my code and see in DB the correct "Montréal". So my guess is that the environment has some default locale setting that forces the use of dedault encoding.
Thanks

I don't have your complete code, but I tried the following code and it works for me:
String x = "c:/Book2.csv";
BufferedReader br = null;
try{
br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(
x), "UTF8"));
String b;
while ((b = br.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println(b);
}
} finally {
if (br != null){
br.close();
}
}
If you see "Montr?al" printed on your console, don't worry. It does not mean that the program is not working. Now, you may want to check if your console supports printing UTF-8 characters. So, you can put a debug and inspect the variable to check if has what you want.
If you see correct value in debug and it prints a "?" in your output, you can rest assured that the String variable is having the right value and you can write it back to any file or DB as needed.
If you see "?" when you query your DB, the tool you may be using is not printing the output correctly. Try reading the DB value in java code an check by putting a debug in you code. I usually use putty to query the DB to see the double byte characters correctly. That's all I have, hope that helps.

You have to use ISO/IEC 8859, not UTF-8, if you look at the list of character encodings on Wikipedia page you'll understand the difference.
Basically, UTF-8 its the commom encoding used by western country...
Also, you can check your terminal encoding, maybe the problem is there.

Reading from Windows-1252 format from Oracle and Writing to XML file with Latin1 characters UTF-8 encoded

I am trying to read from an oracle db which stores data in Windows-1252 encoding. I am reading that data using jdbc and writing to an xml file with UTF-8 encoding.
while writing to these files, I am getting '?' characters instead of the latin characters e.g. instead of í, i get a ?
'Coquí' is being written to XML as 'Coqu?'
I use this file to upload to solr later on.
I have only put the relevant code here and not the whole code since its a long method (legacy code that i have inherited) which is complicated.
BufferedWriter result = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(OUTPUT_FILE));
stmt = conn.createStatement(ResultSet.TYPE_SCROLL_SENSITIVE, ResultSet.CONCUR_READ_ONLY);
rst = stmt.executeQuery(sql);
if (rst.getFetchSize() < 1)
return;
rst.beforeFirst();
while (rst.next()) {
Profile p = new Profile();
p.business_name = rst.getString("business_name");
p.business_name_sort = rst.getString("business_name_sort");
result.write(p.business_name;
result.write(p.business_name_sort);
}

By the sounds of it (you haven't given us the relevant code so I can't be certain) you aren't handling character set conversion properly. Java doesn't perform any automatic character set conversions for you - you've got to do it yourself.
You can do the following to convert it to UTF-8:
String utf8Text = new String(originalText.getBytes("UTF-8"), "UTF-8");
This assumes that originalText is a String containing the Windows-1252 encoded text.

Error when reading non-English language character from file

I am building an app where users have to guess a secret word. I have *.txt files in assets folder. The problem is that words are in Albanian language. Our language uses letters like "ë" and "ç", so whenever I try to read from the file some word containing any of those characters I get some wicked symbol and I can not implement string.compare() for these characters. I have tried many options with UTF-8, changed Eclipse setting but still the same error.
I wold really appreciate if someone has got any advice.
The code I use to read the files is:
AssetManager am = getAssets();
strOpenFile = "fjalet.txt";
InputStream fins = am.open(strOpenFile);
reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(fins));
ArrayList<String> stringList = new ArrayList<String>();
while ((aDataRow = reader.readLine()) != null) {
aBuffer += aDataRow + "\n";
stringList.add(aDataRow);
}
Otherwise the code works fine, except for mentioned characters

It seems pretty clear that the default encoding that is in force when you create the InputStreamReader does not match the file.
If the file you are trying to read is UTF-8, then this should work:
reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(fins, "UTF-8"));
If the file is not UTF-8, then that won't work. Instead you should use the name of the file's true encoding. (My guess is that it is in ISO/IEC_8859-1 or ISO/IEC_8859-16.)
Once you have figured out what the file's encoding really is, you need to try to understand why it does not correspond to your Java platform's default encoding ... and then make a pragmatic decision on what to do about it. (Should you hard-wire the encoding into your application ... as above? Should you make it a configuration property or command parameter? Should you change the default encoding? Should you change the file?)

You need to determine the character encoding that was used when creating the file, and specify this encoding when reading it. If it's UTF-8, for example, use
reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(fins, "UTF-8"));
or
reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(fins, StandardCharsets.UTF_8));
if you're under Java 7.
Text editors like Notepad++ have good heuristics to guess what the encoding of a file is. Try opening it with such an editor and see which encoding it has guessed (if the characters appear correctly).

You should know encoding of the file.
InputStream class reads file binary. Although you can interpet input as character, it will be implicit guessing, which may be wrong.
InputStreamReader class converts binary to chars. But it should know character set.
You should use the following version to feed it by character set.
UPDATE
Don't suggest you have UTF-8 encoded file, which may be wrong. Here in Russia we have such encodings as CP866, WIN1251 and KOI8, which are all differ from UTF8. Probably you have some popular Albanian encoding of text files. Check your OS setting to guess.

How to show regional characters in Android

I get a sites source code by Java and assign it to a string. But when i see content of that string there ara ? instead of ç,ş,İ,ğ. Hope you can help me.

DataInputStream.readLine is capable of reading latin1-encoded text only. The characters you want are not in latin1 so the page must have some different encoding, such as UTF-8.
Assuming the page is encoded in UTF-8 you can read it if you substitute the part where you declare and initialize the variable in with the following:
Reader in = null;
try {
in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(u.getInputStream(), "UTF-8"));
If you don't know the page encoding beforehand you may be able to use the URLConnection.getContentEncoding() method to find out. This method returns the encoding declared i the HTTP header Content-Type. If the content type does not have the encoding you just have to guess.

Convert from Codepage 1252 (Windows) to Java, in Java

I have some strings in Java (originally from an Excel sheet) that I presume are in Windows 1252 codepage. I want them converted to Javas own unicode format. The Excel file was parsed using the JXL package, in case that matter.
I will clarify: apparently the strings gotten from the Excel file look pretty much like it already is some kind of unicode.
WorkbookSettings ws = new WorkbookSettings();
ws.setCharacterSet(someInteger);
Workbook workbook = Workbook.getWorkbook(new File(filename), ws);
Sheet s = workbook.getSheet(sheet);
row = s.getRow(4);
String contents = row[0].getContents();
This is where contents seems to contain something unicode, the åäö are multibyte characters, while the ASCII ones are normal single byte characters. It is most definitely not Latin1. If I print the "contents" string with printLn and redirect it to a hello.txt file, I find that the letter "ö" is represented with two bytes, C3 B6 in hex. (195 and 179 in decimal.)
[edit]
I have tried the suggestions with different codepages etc given below, tried converting from Cp1252 etc. There was some kind of conversion, because I would get some other kind of gibberish instead. As reference I always printed an "ö" string hand coded into the source code, to verify that there was not something wrong with my terminal or typefaces or anything. The manually typed "ö" always worked.
[edit]
I also tried WorkBookSettings as suggested in the comments, but I looked in the code for JXL and characterSet seems to be ignored by parsing code. I think the parsing code just looks at whatever encoding the XLS file is supposed to be in.

WorkbookSettings ws = new WorkbookSettings();
ws.setEncoding("CP1250");
Worked for me.

If none of the answer above solve the problem, the trick might be done like this:
String myOutput = new String (myInput, "UTF-8");
This should decode the incoming string, whatever its format.

When Java parses a file it uses some encoding to read the bytes on the disk and create bytes in memory. The default encoding varies from platform to platform. Java's internal String representation is Unicode already, so if it parses the file with the right encoding then you are already done; just write out the data in any encoding you want.
If your strings appear corrupted when you look at them in Java, it is probably because you are using the wrong encoding to read the data. Excel is probably using UTF-16 (Little-Endian I think) but I'd expect a library like JXL should be able to detect it appropriately. I've looked at the Javadocs for JXL and it doesn't do anything with character encodings. I imagine it auto-detects any encodings as it needs to.
Do you just need to write the already loaded strings to a text file? If so, then something like the following will work:
String text = getCP1252Text(); // doesn't matter what the original encoding was, Java always uses Unicode
FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("test.txt"); // Open file
OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(fos, "UTF-16"); // Specify character encoding
PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(osw);
pw.print(text ); // repeat as needed
pw.close(); // cleanup
osw.close();
fos.close();
If your problem is something else please edit your question and provide more details.

You need to specify the correct encoding when the file is parsed - once you have a Java String based on the wrong encoding, it's too late.
JXL allows you to specify the encoding by passing a WorkbookSettings object to the factory method.

"windows-1252"/"Cp1252" is not required to be supported by JREs, but is by Sun's (and presumably most others). See the "Supported Encodings" in your JDK documentation. Then it's just a matter of using String, InputStreamReader or similar to decode the bytes into chars.

FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream (yourFile);
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(fis,"CP1250"));
And do with reader whatever you'd do directly with file.

Your description indicates that the encoding is UTF-8 and indeed C3 B6 is the UTF-8 encoding for 'ö'.