What exactly returns EntityUtils.toString(response)?

Question

I\'m doing my API REST and I saw that in a lot of examples people use EntityUtils.toString(response) to get their response into a String

Answer 1

Beware the default charset of EntityUtils.toString:

Get the entity content as a String, using the provided default character set if none is found in the entity. If defaultCharset is null, the default "ISO-8859-1" is used.

org.apache.http.util.EntityUtils.toString(response.getEntity, "UTF-8");

Answer 2

An HttpEntity represents the content of the body of an HTTP response. EntityUtils.toString(HttpEntity) interprets that content as a String and returns it to you.

If your HTTP response is something like this

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 80

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root>
    <nested attr="whatever" />
</root>

Then the String returned by EntityUtils.toString(HttpEntity) will simply contain

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root>
    <nested attr="whatever" />
</root>