Develop Reference

Code is not translating german characters from Google Books API correctly

I have produced a little app that searches and displays for me data which I retrieve from Google Books in a neat but simple fashion. Everything works so far, but there is an issue directly at the source: Though Google provides me correctly with German text search results, it for some reason displays all special German characters (Ä, Ö, Ü and ß probably) as the "�" dummy or sometimes just "?".
I was able to confirm that the JSONObject built from the InputStream already contains those mistakes. It seems like the original inputstream from Google is not being read correctly. Weird is that I have "UTF-8" encoding (which should contain german characters) added to my InputStreamReader, but to no avail apparently.
Here is the http-request procedure I am using:
public class HttpRequest {
public static String request(String urlString) throws IOException {
URL url = new URL(urlString);
URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
connection.setConnectTimeout(5000);
connection.setReadTimeout(10000);
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(connection.getInputStream(), "UTF-8"));
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
String inputLine;
while((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null)
builder.append(inputLine);
in.close();
return builder.toString();
}
}
What else could be going wrong? I checked the StringBuilder already, but the mistakes are already in the inputLine(s) that get read out of the BufferedReader.
Also, I was unable to find any language or encoding specific settings in the official google books api guide, so I guess they should come with universal encoding, but then the "UTF-8" flag should detect them, or not?

Easiest is to check the raw data in another way, such as a browser. Looking at a Google Books api url response in the browser is quite simple, just use the url and the response comes back as json. Optionally install a json viewer plugin, but not needed for this.
For example use this url:
https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q=Latein+key=NO
Checking the http header (in the browser developer tools for example) you can see that the header list the content as having the expected encoding:
content-type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
Look at the specific content for some German results and the text there and we can see that it is correct German special characters for some books, but not for all. Depending on the book in question.
Conclusion: UTF-8 is indeed correct and the source/raw data has missing/wrong data for some texts for the German characters.

Reading UTF-8 encoded XML from URL in java

I'm trying to read XML data from Google weather webservice. The response contain some Spanish characters. Problem is that these characters are not displayed properly. I've tried to convert everything to UTF-8 but that does not seem to help. Code is given below
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
URL url = new URL("http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=Noja&hl=es");
HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
con.getInputStream(), "UTF-8"));
String str = in.readLine();
//this does not work even
//String str = new String(in.readLine().getBytes("UTF-8"),"UTF-8");
System.out.println(str);
in.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
Output is given below (trimmed to keep the post in limits). Notice "mi�" and s�b
trimmed to keep max char limit
<day_of_week data="mi�"/><day_of_week data="s�b"/><low data="11"/><high data="16"/><icon data="/ig/images/weather/chance_of_rain.gif"/><condition data="Posibilidad de lluvia"/></forecast_conditions></weather></xml_api_reply>

If that page is xml then you should usually pass the InputStream directly to the xml parser and let it automatically detect the encoding. Otherwise you should look at the charset parameter of the content type response header to determine the correct encoding and create the appropriate InputStreamReader.
Edit: That server is indeed responding with different encodings to the browser and the java client, probably depending on the Accept-Charset request header. For firefox this header has the value
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\r\n
This means both charset are accepted, there is no preference for either one. The server responds with a Content-Type header of text/xml; charset=UTF-8. The java client does not send this header and the server responds with text/xml; charset=ISO-8859-1.
To use the charset supplied by the server you can use code like the following:
Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile("charset\\s*=\\s*([^ ;]+)").matcher(contentType);
String charset = "utf-8"; // default
if (matcher.find()) {
charset = matcher.group(1);
}
System.out.println(con.getContentType());
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
con.getInputStream(), charset));
Edit 2: Turns out the server decides the charset to use based on the user-agent header. If you add the following line, it responds with a charset of utf-8.
con.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0");
Anyway, the Content-Type response header contains the correct charset to use.

Your input may be correct, although I would use an XML parser to read the XML, rather than try and interpret this as a line-by-line feed. However your output may be incorrect.
What's the default char encoding of your JVM ? Check (and set) the confusingly named property -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
Do the requisite fonts etc. exist on your system ? Can you check the actual character codes you're outputting and not rely on your terminal settings ? I would suspect this is perhaps the case, since the encoding/decoding appears to work and you're just missing those individual characters.

How to parse an XML file containing BOM?

I want to parse an XML file from URL using JDOM. But when trying this:
SAXBuilder builder = new SAXBuilder();
builder.build(aUrl);
I get this exception:
Invalid byte 1 of 1-byte UTF-8 sequence.
I thought this might be the BOM issue. So I checked the source and saw the BOM in the beginning of the file. I tried reading from URL using aUrl.openStream() and removing the BOM with Commons IO BOMInputStream. But to my surprise it didn't detect any BOM.
I tried reading from the stream and writing to a local file and parse the local file. I set all the encodings for InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter to UTF8 but when I opened the file it had crazy characters.
I thought the problem is with the source URL encoding. But when I open the URL in browser and save the XML in a file and read that file through the process I described above, everything works fine.
I appreciate any help on the possible cause of this issue.

That HTTP server is sending the content in GZIPped form (Content-Encoding: gzip; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_compression if you don't know what that means), so you need to wrap aUrl.openStream() in a GZIPInputStream that will decompress it for you. For example:
builder.build(new GZIPInputStream(aUrl.openStream()));
Edited to add, based on the follow-up comment: If you don't know in advance whether the URL will be GZIPped, you can write something like this:
private InputStream openStream(final URL url) throws IOException
{
final URLConnection cxn = url.openConnection();
final String contentEncoding = cxn.getContentEncoding();
if(contentEncoding == null)
return cxn.getInputStream();
else if(contentEncoding.equalsIgnoreCase("gzip")
|| contentEncoding.equalsIgnoreCase("x-gzip"))
return new GZIPInputStream(cxn.getInputStream());
else
throw new IOException("Unexpected content-encoding: " + contentEncoding);
}
(warning: not tested) and then use:
builder.build(openStream(aUrl.openStream()));
. This is basically equivalent to the above — aUrl.openStream() is explicitly documented to be a shorthand for aUrl.openConnection().getInputStream() — except that it examines the Content-Encoding header before deciding whether to wrap the stream in a GZIPInputStream.
See the documentation for java.net.URLConnection.

You might find you can avoid handling encoded responses by sending a blank Accept-Encoding header. See http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html: "If no Accept-Encoding field is present in a request, the server MAY assume that the client will accept any content coding.". That seems to be occurring here.

send arabic SMS on mobile in java

in my application there is both arabic and english language suport but i am facing a problem when the mobile receive arabic SMS it is displaied as ??? ???? (question marks) knowing that the monbile i am using for testing supports arabic and all the arabic in the application is working fine the problem is only when an arabic SMS is received by my mobile.
String ff = new String(smsContent.getBytes("UTF-8"), "UTF-8");
StringWriter stringBuffer = new StringWriter();
PrintWriter pOut = new PrintWriter(stringBuffer);
pOut.print("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>");
pOut.print("<!DOCTYPE MESSAGE SYSTEM \"http://127.0.0.1/psms/dtd/messagev12.dtd\" >");
pOut.print("<MESSAGE VER=\"1.2\"><USER USERNAME=\""+userName+"\" PASSWORD=\""+password+"\"/>");
pOut.print("<SMS UDH=\"0\" CODING=\"1\" TEXT=\""+ff+"\" PROPERTY=\"0\" ID=\"2\">");
pOut.print("<ADDRESS FROM=\""+fromNo+"\" TO=\""+toNO+"\" SEQ=\"1\" TAG=\"\" />");
pOut.print("</SMS>");
pOut.print("</MESSAGE>");
pOut.flush();
pOut.close();
URL url = new URL("url");
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
connection.setDoOutput(true);
BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(connection.getOutputStream()));
out.write("data="+message+"&action=send");
out.flush();
SMS in english working file in my application.

First, new String(smsContent.getBytes("UTF-8"), "UTF-8") is a redundant roundtrip, equivalent to smsContent. First you encode the string as bytes via UTF-8, and then immediately decode it back from the bytes again.
Second, your method of puzzling together XML is completely broken. You can't just concatenate strings and hope to end up with well-formed XML. Just for example think about what happens if someone tries to send a "? Use an XML library.
Third, you're implicitly using the platform default encoding for your OutputStreamWriter instead of explicitly specifying one, which means your code only works on those machines which randomly happen to have the correct encoding as default. I'm guessing yours does not.
Fourth, your method of puzzling together POST parameters is broken. You haven't specified what the variable message is. I'm guessing it's the complete XML document, but then you're trying to send it as a POST parameter to some kind of HTTP service, in which case it needs to be escaped/url-encoded. Just for example, what happens if someone tries to send the message &data=<whatever>&? Please clarify.
See also Using java.net.URLConnection to fire and handle HTTP requests
Fifth, since you're sending to some HTTP service, there's probably some documentation for that service what encoding to send or how to specify it, possibly with a HTTP header (Probably "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8"?). Point us to the documentation if you can't figure it out yourself.
Edit: Found the documentation: http://www.google.se/search?q=valuefirst+pace
It pretty clearly states that you need to url encode the XML document, so that's probably what you're missing, in which case the encoding for the OutputStreamWriter won't matter as long as it's ASCII-compatible.
However, the documentation does not specify which character encoding to use for url-encoding, which is pretty weak. UTF-8 is the most likely though.

From what I've read on some internet pages, SMS in arabic languages (and others too) are encoded with UCS-2 and not UTF-8. Changing the encoding is worth a try.

You are using your platform's default encoding for the request data, which may very well differ from UTF-8. Try specifying UTF-8 in the OutputStreamWriter:
... new OutputStreamWriter(connection.getOutputStream(), "UTF-8") ...
Another issue is of course that your hand-made XML document will fail as soon as any of your parameters contain characters, which have to be escaped in XML, but that's a different story. Why don't you use an XML library instead?
Just an additional information: The documentation Christoffer points to also explains that the request example you are using is only suitable for text messages with characters in the standard SMS character set. For Unicode character support, you have to use a different request.

Java (Android) UTF-8 character in string

here's my problem, I am receiving a string from a soap Webservice which seems to contain UTF8 encoded %c3%89. This string is a URL i have to reach to get a picture that contains a part of the URL in it.
My problem is that the server generating the picture doesn't recognize the %c3%89 encoding and thus doesn't create the right . When replaced with it's normal representation (i.e É) the server is generating the picture correctly.
My question is: How can i replace the encoded character in the string?
Ps: I don't have access to the server side
here's my code
URL aURL = new URL(URLDecoder.decode(url));
URLConnection conn = aURL.openConnection();
conn.connect();
InputStream is = conn.getInputStream();
BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(is);
bm = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(bis);
Thanks a lot :)
Hush

You need to pass the character encoding as 2nd argument to URLDecoder#decode(), otherwise it will use the platform default character encoding.
System.out.println(URLDecoder.decode("%c3%89", "ISO-8859-1")); // Ã?
System.out.println(URLDecoder.decode("%c3%89", "UTF-8")); // É

I just realized that the URL was perfectly understood by the website when using earlier version of android (lets say before 2.2) I start to wonder what has changed in the urlconnection framework since that version... anyway i will try to pass through this problem by hosting the required picture on the webservice rather than returning the url.
Thank you