Develop Reference

Encode to UTF-8. Encode character eg. ö to ö

I want to encode a string in Android to UTF-8. For example this string:
Grüne Ähren beißen Flöhe
to
Grüne Ãhren beiÃen Flöhe
But no matter what I do I encode ü to ü or ü to %C3%BC (online often called 'raw URL encode').
Found solutions to convert to byte[] or URI.toASCIIString(). But non of them work for me.
UPDATE
I am participating in the eBay partner network and try to concat a searchword to my partner url.
The people of eBay must use a wrong character set, as UTF-8 URL encoded string don't work.
A searchword with UTF-8 URL encoding
(Grüne Ähren beißen Flöhe
to
Gr%C3%BCne%20%C3%84hren%20bei%C3%9Fen%20Fl%C3%B6he)
comes out to this result in the eBay searchbox:
If I encode my searchword with ISO_8859_1 it works (Grüne Ãhren beiÃen Flöhe):
Thank you very much community

What you essentially want is to convert a String to it's byte representation according to UTF-8 and interpret these bytes using a different Charset, such as ISO-8859-1.
This is usually the cause of many problems. You want to intentionally do what most developers do incorrectly (or they simply ignore the problems of charsets).
Since you just need this to work, use this piece of code:
byte[] bytes = "Grüne Ähren beißen Flöhe".getBytes("UTF-8");
String result = new String(bytes, "ISO-8859-1");
see it at work here.

HMAC-SHA256 - how to?

I am doing HMAC-SHA256 in Android. Here is the following code :
String baseString = "eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpc3MiOiI2NjU0MjA5MGE2NGJhYWU0MzI4NGFiYTY0MmNkNWJmNmFlNzdkNjFhIiwiYXVkIjoiaHR0cHM6Ly9hcHAuaWZvcm1idWlsZGVyLmNvbS9leHphY3QvYXBpL29hdXRoL3Rva2VuIiwiZXhwIjoxNTEwNDMyMzcyLCJpYXQiOjE1MTA0MzE3NzJ9";
String clientSecret = "167edb4d9c3e603131619ae4a92c76307e3f9631";
Mac sha256_HMAC = Mac.getInstance("HmacSHA256");
SecretKeySpec secret_key = new
SecretKeySpec(clientSecret.getBytes("UTF-8"), "HmacSHA256");
sha256_HMAC.init(secret_key);
String jwtSignature =
Base64.encodeToString(sha256_HMAC.doFinal(baseString.getBytes("UTF-8")), Base64.NO_WRAP);
Log.d("JWT-SIGNATURE", jwtSignature);
I get the JWT-SIGNATURE value as 2nFaU/7jcc99jTWCO0VLriN/fiLwqi/ap7eeuVhhal4=
Instead the correct JWT-SIGNATURE value should be 2nFaU_7jcc99jTWCO0VLriN_fiLwqi_ap7eeuVhhal4
There are few characters that are not correct i.e. "/" and a "=" at the end.Can someone kindly help me out.

The encoding you need to use is a variant of Base64 encoding called base64url.
From wikipedia:
Using standard Base64 in URL requires encoding of '+', '/' and '='
characters into special percent-encoded hexadecimal sequences ('+'
becomes '%2B', '/' becomes '%2F' and '=' becomes '%3D'), which makes
the string unnecessarily longer.
For this reason, modified Base64 for URL variants exist, where the '+'
and '/' characters of standard Base64 are respectively replaced by '-'
and '_', so that using URL encoders/decoders is no longer necessary
and have no impact on the length of the encoded value, leaving the
same encoded form intact for use in relational databases, web forms,
and object identifiers in general. Some variants allow or require
omitting the padding '=' signs to avoid them being confused with field
separators, or require that any such padding be percent-encoded. Some
libraries will encode '=' to '.'.

Charset bug in AES Decryption on Android system

Good evening!
In my android app the smartphones load a AES encrypted String from my server and store it in a variable. After that process the variable and a key are pass to a method which decrypt the string. My mistake is that german umlauts (ä, ü, ö) aren't correct decoded. All umlauts displayed as question marks with black background...
My Code:
public static String decrypt(String input, String key) {
byte[] output = null;
String newString = "";
try {
SecretKeySpec skey = new SecretKeySpec(key.getBytes(), "AES");
Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES/ECB/PKCS5Padding");
cipher.init(Cipher.DECRYPT_MODE, skey);
output = cipher.doFinal(Base64.decode(input, Base64.DEFAULT));
newString = new String(output);
} catch(Exception e) {}
return newString;
}
The code works perfectly - only umlauts displayed not correctly, an example is that (should be "ö-ä-ü"):
How can I set the encoding of the decrypted String? In my iOS app I use ASCII to encoding the decoded downloaded String. That works perfectly! Android and iOS get the String from the same Server on the same way - so I think the problem is the local Code above.
I hope you can help me with my problem... Thanks!

There is no text but encoded text.
It seems like you are guessing at the character set and encoding—That's no way to communicate.
To recover the text, you need to reverse the original process applied to it with the parameters associated with each step.
For explanation, assume that the server is taking text from a Java String and sending it to you securely.
String uses the Unicode character set (specifically, Unicode's UTF-16 encoding).
Get the bytes for the String, using some specific encoding, say ISO8859-1. (UTF-8 could be better because it is also an encoding for the Unicode character set, whereas ISO8859-1 has a lot fewer characters.) As #Andy points out, exceptions are your friends here.
Encrypt the bytes with a specific key. The key is a sequence of bytes, so, if you are generating this from a string, you have to use a specific encoding.
Encode the encrypted bytes with Base64, producing a Java String (again, UTF-16) with a subset of characters so reduced that it can be re-encoded in just about any character encoding and placed in just about any context such as SMTP, XML, or HTML without being misinterpreted or making it invalid.
Transmit the string using a specific encoding. An HTTP header and/or HTML charset value is usually used to communicate which encoding.
To receive the text, you have to get:
the bytes,
the encoding from step 5,
the key from step 3,
the encoding from step 3 and
the encoding from step 2.
Then you can reverse all of the steps. Per your comments, you discovered you weren't using the encoding from step 2. You also need to use the encoding from step 3.

Convert Utf-16 to UTF-8 strings with data losing using Java

I have to insert text which 99,9% is UTF-8 but have 0.01% UTF-16 characters. Sо when I try to save it in my Mysql databse using Hibernate and Spring an exception occured. I can even remove these chars there is no problem, so I want to convert all my text in UTF-8 and save to my database with data losing, so the problem chars to be removed. I tried
String string = "😈 Devil Emoji";
byte[] converttoBytes = string.getBytes("UTF-16");
string = new String(converttoBytes, "UTF-8");
System.out.println(string);
But nothing happens.
😈 Devil Emoji
Is there any external library in order to do that?

😈 probably has nothing to do with UTF-16. It's hex is F09F9888. Notice that that is 4 bytes. Also notice that that is a UTF-8 encoding, not a "Unicode" encoding: U+1F608 or \u1F608. UTF-16 would be none of the above. More (scarfboy).
MySQL's utf8 handles only 3-byte (or shorter) UTF-8 characters. MySQL's utf8mb4 also handles 4-byte characters like that little devil.
You need to change the CHARACTER SET of the column you are storing him into. And you need to establish that your connection is charset=UTF-8.
Note: things outside MySQL call it UTF-8, but MySQL calls it utf8mb4.

String holds Unicode in java, so all scripts can be combined.
byte[] converttoBytes = string.getBytes("UTF-16");
These bytes are binary data, but actually used to store text, encoded in UTF-16.
string = new String(converttoBytes, "UTF-8");
Now String thinks that the bytes represent text encoding in UTF-8, and converts those. This is wrong.
Now to detect the encoding, either UTF-8 or UTF-16, then that should best be done on bytes, not String, as that String then has an erroneous conversion with possible loss.
As UTF-8 has the most strict format of both, we'll check that one.
Also UTF-16 has a byte 0 for ASCII, that almost never occurs in normal text.
So something like
public static String string(byte[] bytes) {
ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(bytes);
CharsetDecoder decoder = StandardCharsets.UTF_8.newDecoder();
decoder.onMalformedInput(CodingErrorAction.REPORT);
decoder.onUnmappableCharacter(CodingErrorAction.REPORT);
try {
String s = decoder.decode(buffer).toString();
if (!s.contains("\u0000")) { // Could be UTF-16
return s;
}
} catch (CharacterCodingException e) { // Error in UTF-8
}
return new String(bytes, "UTF-16LE");
}
If you only have a String (for instance from the database), then
if (!s.contains("\u0000")) { // Could be UTF-16
s = new String(s.getBytes("Windows-1252"), "UTF-16LE");
}
might work or make a larger mess.

Why do I have to encode a utf-8 parameter String to iso-Latin and then decode as utf-8 to get Java utf-8 String?

I have a Java servlet that takes a parameter String (inputString) that may contain Greek letters from a web page marked up as utf-8. Before I send it to a database I have to convert it to a new String (utf8String) as follows:
String utf8String = new String(inputString.getBytes("8859_1"), "UTF-8");
This works, but, as I hope will be appreciated, I hate doing something I don't understand, even if it works.
From the method description in the Java doc the getBytes() method "Encodes this String into a sequence of bytes using the named charset, storing the result into a new byte array" i.e. I am encoding it in 8859_1 — isoLatin. And from the Constructor description "Constructs a new String by decoding the specified array of bytes using the specified charset" i.e. decodes the byte array to utf-8.
Can someone explain to me why this is necessary?

My question is based on a misconception regarding the character set used for the HTTP request. I had assumed that because I marked up the web page from which the request was sent as UTF-8 the request would be sent as UTF-8, and so the Greek characters in the parameter sent to the servlet would be read as a UTF-8 String (‘inputString’ in my line of code) by the HttpRequest.getParameter() method. This is not the case.
HTTP requests are sent as ISO-8859-1 (POST) or ASCII (GET), which are generally the same. This is part of the URI Syntax specification — thanks to Andreas for pointing me to http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/FAQ/CharacterEncoding where this is explained.
I had also forgotten that the encoding of Greek letters such as α for the request is URL-encoding, which produces %CE%B1. The getParameter() handles this by decoding it as two ISO-8859-1 characters, %CE and %B1 — Î and ± (I checked this).
I now understand why this needs to be turned into a byte array and the bytes interpreted as UTF-8. 0xCE does not represent a one-byte character in UTF-8 and hence it is addressed with the next byte, 0xB1, to be interpretted as α. (Î is 0xC3 0x8E and ± is 0xC2 0xB1 in UTF-8.)

When decoding, could you not create a class with a decoder method that takes the bytes [] as a parameter and
return it as a string? here is an example that i have used before.
public class Decoder
{
public String decode(byte[] bytes)
{
//Turns the bytes array into a string
String decodedString = new String(bytes);
return decodedString;
}
}
Try use this instead of .getBytes(). hope this works.