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How to handle  (object replacement character) in URL

Using Jsoup to scrape URLS and one of the URLS I keep getting has this  symbol in it. I have tried decoding the URL:
url = URLDecoder.decode(url, "UTF-8" );
but it still remains in the code looking like this:
I cant find much online about this other than it is "The object replacement character, sometimes used to represent an embedded object in a document when it is converted to plain text."
But if this is the case I should be able to print the symbol if it is plain text but when I run
System.out.println("");
I get the following complication error:
and it reverts back to the last save.
Sample URL: https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles%ef%bf%bc/
NOTE: If you decode the url then compare it to the decoded url it comes back as not the same e.g.:
String url = URLDecoder.decode("https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles%ef%bf%bc/", "UTF-8");
if(url.contains("https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles?/")){
System.out.println("The same");
}else {
System.out.println("Not the same");
}

That's not a compilation error. That's the eclipse code editor telling you it can't save the source code to a file, because you have told it to save the file in a cp1252 encoding, but that encoding can't express a .
Put differently, your development environment is currently configured to store source code in the cp1252 encoding, which doesn't support the character you want, so you either configure your development environment to store source code using a more flexible encoding (such as UTF-8 the error message suggests), or avoid having that character in your source code, for instance by using its unicode escape sequence instead:
System.out.println("\ufffc");
Note that as far as the Java language and runtime are concerned,  is a character like any other, so there may not be a particular need to "handle" it. Also, I am unsure why you'd expect URLDecoder to do anything if the URL hasn't been URL-encoded to begin with.

"ef bf bc" is a 3 bytes UTF-8 character so as the error says, there's no representation for that character in "CP1252" Windows page encoding.
An option could be to replace that percent encoding sequence with an ascii representation to make the filename for saving:
String url = URLDecoder.decode("https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles%ef%bf%bc/".replace("%ef%bf%bc", "-xEFxBFxBC"), "UTF-8");
url ==> "https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-emb ... contract-roles-xEFxBFxBC/"
Another option using CharsetDecoder
String urlDec = URLDecoder.decode("https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles%ef%bf%bc/", "UTF-8");
CharsetDecoder decoder = Charset.forName("CP1252").newDecoder().onMalformedInput(CodingErrorAction.REPLACE).onUnmappableCharacter(CodingErrorAction.REPLACE);
String urlDec = URLDecoder.decode("https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles%ef%bf%bc/", "UTF-8");
ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(urlDec.getBytes(Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
decoder.decode(buffer).toString();
Result
"https://www.breightgroup.com/job/hse-advisor-embedded-contract-roles/"

I found the issue resolved by just replacing URLs with this symbol because there are other URLs with Unicode symbols that were invisible that couldnt be converted ect..
So I just compared the urls to the following regex if it returns false then I just bypass it. Hope this helps someone out:
boolean newURL = url.matches("^[a-zA-Z0-9_:;/.&|%!+=#?-]*$");

Why is my UTF-8 encoded data not staying ?UTF-8? encoded?

The problem I'm trying to fix is this:
Users of our application are copy/pasting characters from windows-related docs like Word for instance, and our application is not recognizing single and double quotes or bullets.
These are the steps I've taken so far to get this data into UTF format:
inside servers.xml, in Connector tag, I added the attribute URIEncoding="UTF-8".
in the bean charged with storing the input, I created a byte[] and passed in String holding inputNote text, then converted it to UTF-8. Then passed the UTF-8 converted String back to inputNoteText String. Please see directly below for condensed code on this.
byte[] bytesInUTF8inputNoteText = inputNoteText.getBytes("UTF-8");
inputNoteText = new String(bytesInUTF8inputNoteText, "UTF-8");
this.var = inputNoteText;
In the variable-setter charged with holding the result from the db query:
setNoteText(noteText) to convert the note data coming from database query into bytes in UTF8 format, then converted it back into a String and set it to String noteText property. Also below.
public void setNoteText(String noteText) throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
byte[] bytesInUTF8inputNoteText = noteText.getBytes("UTF-8");
String noteTextUTF8 = new String(bytesInUTF8inputNoteText, "UTF-8");
this.noteText = noteTextUTF8;}
In SQL Server I changed the data type from text to nvarchar(MAX) to store the data in Unicode, even though that is a different type of Unicode.
What I see when I copy/paste from a MS Word doc into our JSF input textbox:
In Eclipse if I set a watch on the property in the bean, once the data in that String property has been converted into UTF-8, all characters are in UTF-8 format. When I post to to SQL Server the string of data held in nvarchar(max) datatype shows all characters in UTF-8 format correctly. Then when the resultSet is returned and the holding property is populated with the String returned from the db query, it also shows as all being correctly formatted in UTF-8....BUT,...somewhere in between the correct string value that's sitting in the property that's tied into the JSF page and the JSF page, 1.2 by the way, the value is being unformatted so that I see question marks where I should see single/double quotes and bullet points. I hope that someone has run into this type of issue before and can shed some light on what I need to do to fix this. Seems kind of like a JSF bug, thanks in advance for your input!!

try this
String noteText = new String (noteText.getBytes ("iso-8859-1"), "UTF-8");

When you copy paste from windows documents, the encoding format is not UTF-8 but [Windows-1252] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252). Note the cells marked in thick green borders. These chars DONT map to UTF-8 charset and so you will have to use Windows-1252 encoding while reading.

Java+HtmlUnit — problem with cyrillic urlencode

I am trying to send some HTTP POST parameters to some web server and one of parameters contains cyrillic characters. So the problem is that if I use this code:
wc.getPage(requestSettings);
requestSettings.setHttpMethod(HttpMethod.POST);
requestSettings.setRequestParameters(new ArrayList());
requestSettings.getRequestParameters().add(new NameValuePair("username", "Друже бобер"));
wc.getPage(requestSettings);
Server will recieve the next urlencoded parameter:
And this is wrong decoded string "Друже бобер".
So I think that HtmlUnit encode url in core with using ASCII not Unicode. How to disable url encoding or how to fix this bug? If I'll encode this string and set to NameValuePair so all percent characters will be encoded by HtmlUnit to.

I think you need to set the charset using the setCharset method.

response.sendredirect with url with foreign chars - how to encode?

I have a jsf app that has international users so form inputs can have non-western strings like kanjii and chinese - if I hit my url with ..?q=東日本大 the output on the page is correct and I see the q input in my form gets populated fine. But if I enter that same string into my form and submit, my app does a redirect back to itself after constructing the url with the populated parameters in the url (seems redundant but this is due to 3rd party integration) but the redirect is not encoding the string properly. I have
url = new String(url.getBytes("ISO-8859-1"), "UTF-8");
response.sendRedirect(url);
But url redirect ends up being q=???? I've played around with various encoding strings (switched around ISO and UTF-8 and just got a bunch of gibberish in the url) in the String constructor but none seem to work to where I get q=東日本大 Any ideas as to what I need to do to get the q=東日本大 populated in the redirect properly? Thanks.

How are you making your url? URIs can't directly have non-ASCII characters in; they have to be turned into bytes (using a particular encoding) and then %-encoded.
URLEncoder.encode should be given an encoding argument, to ensure this is the right encoding. Otherwise you get the default encoding, which is probably wrong and always to be avoided.
String q= "\u6771\u65e5\u672c\u5927"; // 東日本大
String url= "http://example.com/query?q="+URLEncoder.encode(q, "utf-8");
// http://example.com/query?q=%E6%9D%B1%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E5%A4%A7
response.sendRedirect(url);
This URI will display as the IRI ‘http://example.com/query?q=東日本大’ in the browser address bar.
Make sure you're serving your pages as UTF-8 (using Content-Type header/meta) and interpreting query string input as UTF-8 (server-specific; see this faq for Tomcat.)

Try
response.setContentType("text/html; charset=UTF-16");
response.setCharacterEncoding("utf-16");

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.