UTF8 characters showing weirdly or random basis in Android TextView - java

It has been at least 5 applications in which I have attempted to display UTF8 encoded characters and every time, quite sporadically and rarely I see random characters being replaced by diamond question marks (see image for better details).
I enclose a page layout to demonstrate my issues. The layout is very basic, it is very simple poll I am creating. The "Съгласен съм" text is takes from a database, where it has just been inserted by a script, using copy-pasted constant. The text is displayed in TextViews.
Has anyone ever encountered such an issue? Please advise!
EDIT: Something I forgot to mention is that the amount and position of weird characters varies on diffferent Android Phone models.

Finally I got it all sorted out in all my applications. Actually the issues mlet down to 3 different reasons and I will list all of them below so that this findings of mine could help people in the future.
Reason 1: Incorrect encoding of user created file.
This actually was the problem with the application I posted about in the question. The problem was that the encoding of the insert script I used for introducing the values in the database was "UTF8 without BOM". I converted this encoding to "UTF8" using Notepad++ and reinserted the values in the database and the issue was resolved. Thanks to #user3249477 for pointing me to thinking in this direction. By the way "UTF8 without BOM" seems to be the default encoding Eclipse uses when creating URF8 files, so take care!
Reason 2: Incorrect encoding of generated file.
The problem of reason 1, pointed me to what to think for in some of the other cases I was facing. In one application of mine I am provided with raw data that I insert in my backend database using simple Java application. The problem there turned out to be that I was passing through intermediate format, files stored on the file system that ?I used to verify I interpretted the raw data correctly. I noticed that these files were also created "UTF8 without BOM". I used this code to write to these files:
BufferedOutputStream outputStream = new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(outputFilePath));
writer = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(outputStream, STRING_ENCODING));
writer.append(string);
Which I changed to:
BufferedOutputStream outputStream = new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(outputFilePath));
writer = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(outputStream, STRING_ENCODING));
// prepending a bom
writer.write('\ufeff');
writer.append(string);
Following the prescriptions from this answer. This line I add basically made all the intermediate files be encoded in "UTF8" with BOM and resolved my encoding issues.
Reason 3: Incorrect parsing of HTTP responses
The last issue I encountered in few of my applications was that I was not interpretting the UTF8 http responses correctly. I used to have the following code:
HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(host, request, (HttpContext) null);
String responseBody = null;
responseBody = IOHelper.getInputStreamContents(responseStream);
Where IOHelper is an util I have written myself and reads stream contents to String. I replaced this code with the already provided method in the Android API:
HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(host, request, (HttpContext) null);
String responseBody = null;
if (response.getEntity() != null) {
responseBody = EntityUtils.toString(response.getEntity(), HTTP.UTF_8);
}
And this fixed the encoding issues I was having with HTTP responses.
As conclusion I can say that one needs to take special care of BOM / without BOM strings when using UTF8 encoding in Android. I am very happy I learnt so many new things during this investigation.

Related

How to convert MultipartFile to UTF-8 always while using CSVFormat?

I am using a spring boot REST API to upload csv file MultipartFile. CSVFormat library of org.apache.commons.csv is used to format the MultipartFile and CSVParser is used to parse and the iterated records are stored into the MySql database.
csvParser = CSVFormat.DEFAULT
.withDelimiter(separator)
.withIgnoreSurroundingSpaces()
.withQuote('"')
.withHeader(CsvHeaders.class)
.parse(new InputStreamReader(csvFile.getInputStream()));
Observation is that when the CSV files are uploaded with charset of UTF-8 then it works good. But if the CSV file is of a different format (ANSI etc.,) other than it, its encoding German and other language characters to some random symbols.
Example äößü are encoded to ����
I tried the below to specify the encoding standard, it did not work too.
csvParser = CSVFormat.DEFAULT
.withDelimiter(separator)
.withIgnoreSurroundingSpaces()
.withQuote('"')
.withHeader(CsvHeaders.class)
.parse(new InputStreamReader(csvFile.getInputStream(), StandardCharsets.UTF_8));
Can you please advise. Thank you so much in advance.
What you did new InputStreamReader(csvFile.getInputStream(), StandardCharsets.UTF_8) tells the CSV parser that the content of the inputstream is UTF-8 encoded.
Since UTF-8 is (usally) the standard encoding, this is actually the same as using new InputStreamReader(csvFile.getInputStream()).
If I get your question correctly, this is not what you intended. Instead you want to automatically choose the right encoding based on the Import-file, right?
Unfortunatelly the csv-format does not store the information which encoding was used.
There are some libraries you could use to guess the most probable encoding based on the characters contained in the file. While they are pretty accurate, they are still guessing and there is no guarantee that you will get the right encoding in the end.
Depending on your use case it might be easier to just agree with the consumer on a fixed encoding (i.e. they can upload UTF-8 or ANSI, but not both)
Try as shown below which worked for me for the same issue
new InputStreamReader(csvFile.getInputStream(), "UTF-8")

Character encoding in csv

We have a requirement of picking the data from Oracle DB table and dump that data into a csv file and a plain pipe seperated text file. Give a link to user on application so user can view the generated csv/text files.
As lot of parsing was involved so we wrote a Unix shell script and are calling it from out Struts/J2ee application.
Earlier we were loosing the Chinese and Roman chars in the generated files and the generated file were having us-ascii charset(cheked using-> file -i). Later we used NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.AL32UTF8 and this gave us utf-8 format files.
But still the characters were gibberish, so again we tried iconv command and converted utf-8 files to utf-16le charset.
iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-16le $recordFile > $tempFile
This works fine for the generated text file. But with CSV the Chinese and Roman chars are still not correct. Now if we open this csv file in a Notepad and give a newline by pressing Enter key from keyboard, save it. Open it with MS-Excel, all characters are coming fine including the Chinese and Romans but now the text is in single line for each row instead of columns.
Not sure what's going on.
Java code
PrintWriter out = servletResponse.getWriter();
servletResponse.setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel; charset=UTF-8");
servletResponse.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
servletResponse.setHeader("Content-Disposition","attachment; filename="+ fileName.toString());
FileInputStream fileInputStream = new FileInputStream(fileLoc + fileName);
int i;
while ((i=fileInputStream.read()) != -1) {
out.write(i);
}
fileInputStream.close();
out.close();
Please let me know if i missed out any details.
Thanks to all for taking out time to go through this.
Was able to solve it out. First as mentioned by Aaron removed UTF-16LE encoding to avoid future issues and encoded files to UTF-8. Changed the PrintWriter in Java code to OutputStream and was able to see the correct characters in my text file.
CSV was still showing garbage. Came to know that we need to prepend EF BB BF at the beginning of file as the BOM aware software like MS-Excel needs it. So changing the Java code as below did the trick for csv.
OutputStream out = servletResponse.getOutputStream();
os.write(239); //0xEF
os.write(187); //0xBB
out.write(191); //0xBF
FileInputStream fileInputStream = new FileInputStream(fileLoc + fileName);
int i;
while ((i=fileInputStream.read()) != -1) {
out.write(i);
}
fileInputStream.close();
out.flush();
out.close();
As always with Unicode problems, every single step of the transformation chain must work perfectly. If you make a mistake in one place, data will be silently corrupted. There is no easy way to figure out where it happens, you have to debug the code or write unit tests.
The Java code above only works if the file actually contains UTF-8 encoded data; it doesn't "magically" figure out what's in the file and converts it to UTF-8. So if the file already contains garbage, you just slap a "this is UTF-8" label on it but it's still garbage.
That means for you that you need to create test cases which take known test data and move that through every step of the chain: Inserting into database, reading from the database, writing to CSV, writing to the text file, reading those files and download to the user.
For each step, you need to write unit tests which takes a known Unicode string like abc öäü and processes it and then check the result. To make it easier to input in Java code, use "abc \u00f6\u00e4\u00fc" You may also want to add spaces at the beginning and end of the string to see whether they are properly preserved or not.
file -i doesn't help you much here since it just makes a guess what the file contains. There is no indicator (data or metadata) in a text file which says "this is UTF-8". UTF-16 supports a BOM header for this but almost no one uses UTF-16, so many tools don't support it (properly).

Get the source code of a URL

I need to get the source code of the particular URL using a java code. I was able to get the source code for UTF-8 encoded web page but was not able to get the code for ISO-8859-1 encoded character set. My question, is it possible to get the source code of website with iso-8859-1 using a java program? Please help
If you are reading by using following method you need to Specify character set explicitly by
URL url = new URL(URL_TO_READ);
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(url.openStream(),"ISO-8859-1" ));
How ever if there is little parsing include with your requirement I would suggest you to use JSOUP and it will read the character-set from the response of server, Also you could explicitly set the charset

Java string encoding conversion within a webpage

I have a webpage that is encoded (through its header) as WIN-1255.
A Java program creates text string that are automatically embedded in the page. The problem is that the original strings are encoded in UTF-8, thus creating a Gibberish text field in the page.
Unfortunately, I can not change the page encoding - it's required by a customer propriety system.
Any ideas?
UPDATE:
The page I'm creating is an RSS feed that needs to be set to WIN-1255, showing information taken from another feed that is encoded in UTF-8.
SECOND UPDATE:
Thanks for all the responses. I've managed to convert th string, and yet, Gibberish. Problem was that XML encoding should be set in addition to the header encoding.
Adam
To the point, you need to set the encoding of the response writer. With only a response header you're basically only instructing the client application which encoding to use to interpret/display the page. This ain't going to work if the response itself is written with a different encoding.
The context where you have this problem is entirely unclear (please elaborate about it as well in future problems like this), so here are several solutions:
If it is JSP, you need to set the following in top of JSP to set the response encoding:
<%# page pageEncoding="WIN-1255" %>
If it is Servlet, you need to set the following before any first flush to set the response encoding:
response.setCharacterEncoding("WIN-1255");
Both by the way automagically implicitly set the Content-Type response header with a charset parameter to instruct the client to use the same encoding to interpret/display the page. Also see this article for more information.
If it is a homegrown application which relies on the basic java.net and/or java.io API's, then you need to write the characters through an OutputStreamWriter which is constructed using the constructor taking 2 arguments wherein you can specify the encoding:
Writer writer = new OutputStreamWriter(someOutputStream, "WIN-1255");
Assuming you have control of the original (properly represented) strings, and simply need to output them in win-1255:
import java.nio.charset.*;
import java.nio.*;
Charset win1255 = Charset.forName("windows-1255");
ByteBuffer bb = win1255.encode(someString);
byte[] ba = new byte[bb.limit()];
Then, simply write the contents of ba at the appropriate place.
EDIT: What you do with ba depends on your environment. For instance, if you're using servlets, you might do:
ServletOutputStream os = ...
os.write(ba);
We also should not overlook the possible approach of calling setContentType("text/html; charset=windows-1255") (setContentType), then using getWriter normally. You did not make completely clear if windows-1255 was being set in a meta tag or in the HTTP response header.
You clarified that you have a UTF-8 file that you need to decode. If you're not already decoding the UTF-8 strings properly, this should no big deal. Just look at InputStreamReader(someInputStream, Charset.forName("utf-8"))
What's embedding the data in the page? Either it should read it as text (in UTF-8) and then write it out again in the web page's encoding (Win-1255) or you should change the Java program to create the files (or whatever) in Win-1255 to start with.
If you can give more details about how the system works (what's generating the web page? How does it interact with the Java program?) then it will make things a lot clearer.
The page I'm creating is an RSS feed that needs to be set to WIN-1255, showing information taken from another feed that is encoded in UTF-8.
In this case, use a parser to load the UTF-8 XML. This should correctly decode the data to UTF-16 character data (Java Strings are always UTF-16). Your output mechanism should encode from UTF-16 to Windows-1255.
byte[] originalUtf8;//Here input
//utf-8 to java String:
String internal = new String(originalUtf8,Charset.forName("utf-8");
//java string to w1255 String
byte[] win1255 = internal.getBytes(Charset.forName("cp1255"));
//Here output

UTF-8 character encoding in Java

I am having some problems getting some French text to convert to UTF8 so that it can be displayed properly, either in a console, text file or in a GUI element.
The original string is
HANDICAP╔ES
which is supposed to be
HANDICAPÉES
Here is a code snippet that shows how I am using the jackcess Database driver to read in the Acccess MDB file in an Eclipse/Linux environment.
Database database = Database.open(new File(filepath));
Table table = database.getTable(tableName, true);
Iterator rowIter = table.iterator();
while (rowIter.hasNext()) {
Map<String, Object> row = this.rowIter.next();
// convert fields to UTF
Map<String, Object> rowUTF = new HashMap<String, Object>();
try {
for (String key : row.keySet()) {
Object o = row.get(key);
if (o != null) {
String valueCP850 = o.toString();
// String nameUTF8 = new String(valueCP850.getBytes("CP850"), "UTF8"); // does not work!
String valueISO = new String(valueCP850.getBytes("CP850"), "ISO-8859-1");
String valueUTF8 = new String(valueISO.getBytes(), "UTF-8"); // works!
rowUTF.put(key, valueUTF8);
}
}
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
System.err.println("Encoding exception: " + e);
}
}
In the code you'll see where I want to convert directly to UTF8, which doesn't seem to work, so I have to do a double conversion. Also note that there doesn't seem to be a way to specify the encoding type when using the jackcess driver.
Thanks,
Cam
New analysis, based on new information.
It looks like your problem is with the encoding of the text before it was stored in the Access DB. It seems it had been encoded as ISO-8859-1 or windows-1252, but decoded as cp850, resulting in the string HANDICAP╔ES being stored in the DB.
Having correctly retrieved that string from the DB, you're now trying to reverse the original encoding error and recover the string as it should have been stored: HANDICAPÉES. And you're accomplishing that with this line:
String valueISO = new String(valueCP850.getBytes("CP850"), "ISO-8859-1");
getBytes("CP850") converts the character ╔ to the byte value 0xC9, and the String constructor decodes that according to ISO-8859-1, resulting in the character É. The next line:
String valueUTF8 = new String(valueISO.getBytes(), "UTF-8");
...does nothing. getBytes() encodes the string in the platform default encoding, which is UTF-8 on your Linux system. Then the String constructor decodes it with the same encoding. Delete that line and you should still get the same result.
More to the point, your attempt to create a "UTF-8 string" was misguided. You don't need to concern yourself with the encoding of Java's strings--they're always UTF-16. When bringing text into a Java app, you just need to make sure you decode it with the correct encoding.
And if my analysis is correct, your Access driver is decoding it correctly; the problem is at the other end, possibly before the DB even comes into the picture. That's what you need to fix, because that new String(getBytes()) hack can't be counted on to work in all cases.
Original analysis, based on no information. :-/
If you're seeing HANDICAP╔ES on the console, there's probably no problem. Given this code:
System.out.println("HANDICAPÉES");
The JVM converts the (Unicode) string to the platform default encoding, windows-1252, before sending it to the console. Then the console decodes that using its own default encoding, which happens to be cp850. So the console displays it wrong, but that's normal. If you want it to display correctly, you can change the console's encoding with this command:
CHCP 1252
To display the string in a GUI element, such as a JLabel, you don't have to do anything special. Just make sure you use a font that can display all the characters, but that shouldn't be problem for French.
As for writing to a file, just specify the desired encoding when you create the Writer:
OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(
new FileOutputStream("myFile.txt"), "UTF-8");
String s = "HANDICAP╔ES";
System.out.println(new String(s.getBytes("CP850"), "ISO-8859-1")); // HANDICAPÉES
This shows the correct string value. This means that it was originally encoded/decoded with ISO-8859-1 and then incorrectly encoded with CP850 (originally CP1252 a.k.a. Windows ANSI as pointed in a comment is indeed also possible since the É has the same codepoint there as in ISO-8859-1).
Align your environment and binary pipelines to use all the one and same character encoding. You can't and shouldn't convert between them. You would risk losing information in the non-ASCII range that way.
Note: do NOT use the above code snippet to "fix" the problem! That would not be the right solution.
Update: you are apparently still struggling with the problem. I'll repeat the important parts of the answer:
Align your environment and binary pipelines to use all the one and same character encoding.
You can not and should not convert between them. You would risk losing information in the non-ASCII range that way.
Do NOT use the above code snippet to "fix" the problem! That would not be the right solution.
To fix the problem you need to choose character encoding X which you'd like to use throughout the entire application. I suggest UTF-8. Update MS Access to use encoding X. Update your development environment to use encoding X. Update the java.io readers and writers in your code to use encoding X. Update your editor to read/write files with encoding X. Update the application's user interface to use encoding X. Do not use Y or Z or whatever at some step. If the characters are already corrupted in some datastore (MS Access, files, etc), then you need to fix it by manually replacing the characters right there in the datastore. Do not use Java for this.
If you're actually using the "command prompt" as user interface, then you're actually lost. It doesn't support UTF-8. As suggested in the comments and in the article linked in the comments, you need to create a Swing application instead of relying on the restricted command prompt environment.
You can specify encoding when establishing connection. This way was perfect and solve my encoding problem:
DatabaseImpl open = DatabaseImpl.open(new File("main.mdb"), true, null, Database.DEFAULT_AUTO_SYNC, java.nio.charset.Charset.availableCharsets().get("windows-1251"), null, null);
Table table = open.getTable("FolderInfo");
Using "ISO-8859-1" helped me deal with the French charactes.

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