Android Java UTF-8 HttpClient Problem

Question

I am having weird character encoding issues with a JSON array that is grabbed from a web page. The server is sending back this header:

Content-Type text/javascri

Answer 1

It is just that your convertStreamToString is not honoring encoding set in the HttpRespnose. If you look inside EntityUtils.toString(entity, HTTP.UTF_8), you will see that EntityUtils find out if there is encoding set in the HttpResponse first, then if there is, EntityUtils use that encoding. It will only fall back to the encoding passed in the parameter(in this case HTTP.UTF_8) if there isn't encoding set in the entity.

So you can say that your HTTP.UTF_8 is passed in the parameter but it never get used because it is the wrong encoding. So here is update to your code with the helper method from EntityUtils.

           HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
           String charset = getContentCharSet(entity);
           InputStream instream = entity.getContent();
           String jsonText = convertStreamToString(instream,charset);

    private static String getContentCharSet(final HttpEntity entity) throws ParseException {
    if (entity == null) {
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("HTTP entity may not be null");
    }
    String charset = null;
    if (entity.getContentType() != null) {
        HeaderElement values[] = entity.getContentType().getElements();
        if (values.length > 0) {
            NameValuePair param = values[0].getParameterByName("charset");
            if (param != null) {
                charset = param.getValue();
            }
        }
    }
    return TextUtils.isEmpty(charset) ? HTTP.UTF_8 : charset;
}



private static String convertStreamToString(InputStream is, String encoding) {
    /*
     * To convert the InputStream to String we use the
     * BufferedReader.readLine() method. We iterate until the BufferedReader
     * return null which means there's no more data to read. Each line will
     * appended to a StringBuilder and returned as String.
     */
    BufferedReader reader;
    try {
        reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is, encoding));
    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e1) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e1.printStackTrace();
    }
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

    String line;
    try {
        while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
            sb.append(line + "\n");
        }
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    } finally {
        try {
            is.close();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
    return sb.toString();
}