BlackBerry UTF-8 InputStreamReader on Socket issue - java

I'm trying to read the response from a server using a socket and the information is UTF-8 encoded. I'm wrapping the InputStream from the socket in an InputStreamReader with the encoding set to "UTF-8".
For some reason it seems like only part of the response is read and then the reading just hangs for about a minute or two and then it finishes. If I set the encoding on the InputStreamReader to "ISO-8859-1" then I can read all of the data right away, but obviously not all of the characters are displayed correctly.
Code looks something like the following
socketConn = (SocketConnection)Connector.open(url);
InputStreamReader is = new InputStreamReader(socketConn.openInputStream(), "UTF-8");
Then I read through the headers and the content. The content is chunked and I read the line with the size of each chunk (convert to decimal from hex) to know how much to read.
I'm not understanding the difference in reading with the two encodings and the effect it can have because it works without issue with ISO-8859-1 and it works eventually with UTF-8, there is just the long delay.

It's hard to get the reason of the delay.
You may try another way of getting the data from the network:
byte[] data = IOUtilities.streamToBytes(socketConn.openInputStream());
I believe the above should be passed without delay. Then having got the bytes from network you can start data processing. Note you can always get a String from bytes representing a string in UTF-8 encoding:
String stringInUTF8 = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");
UPDATE: see the second comment to this post.

I was already removing the chunk sizes on the fly so I ended up doing something somewhat similar to the IOUtilities answer. Instead of using an InputStreamReader I just used the InputStream. InputStream has a read method that can fill an array of bytes, so for each chunk the code looks something like this
byte[] buf = new buf[size];
is.read(buf);
return new String(buf, "UTF-8");
This seems to work, doesn't cause any delays and I can remove the extra information about the chunks on the fly.

Related

Do I have any performance gain using the BufferedReader in this case?

I want to send a CSV file encoded in base64 from Client to Server, in order to parse it and use the data.
I want to get the InputStream directly from the Request object and pipe it to the reader used by the CSV parser.
Is there any performance or memory gain using this method?
Can the following code achieve this ? I feel like there's something missing while decoding the content.
Is BufferedReader really needed in this example ?
/* Suppose I get a Base64 encoded CSV file from the client */
String csvContent = "Column 1;Column 2;Column 3\r\nValue 1;Value 2;Value 3\r\n";
ByteArrayInputStream inputStream = new ByteArrayInputStream(Base64.encodeBase64(csvContent.getBytes()));
/* retrieving the content UPDATED */
Base64InputStream b64InputStream = new Base64InputStream(inputStream, false);
/* Parsing the CSV content */
Reader reader = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(b64InputStream));
CSVParser csvParser = new CSVParser(reader, FORMAT_EXCEL_FR);
/* printing results */
csvParser.forEach(record -> printRecord(record));
Update
I replaced the byte[] array with a Base64InputStream from org.apache.commons.codec
Probably not. A BufferedReader ... uses a buffer. It is commonly used when your data is not in java memory yet. ( e.g. socket communication, reading data from a file , ... )
In your case, you are wrapping a byte[], which means that the data is already in memory. So there is no point in adding a buffer.
The javadoc describes a BufferedReader as follows:
Reads text from a character-input stream, buffering characters so as to provide for the efficient reading of characters, arrays, and lines.
Now, let's say for example you want to read the content of a file, and want to check something byte-per-byte. So you do a lot of byte b = in.read(); calls. In that case, a buffered reader will actually fetch those bytes in chunks internally.
So, basically, whenever it is more efficient to fetch data in chunks, use a BufferedReader.
Update
In response to your update. No, also in this case it's not necessary to add a BufferedReader. As Holger pointed out:
It's likely that the CSVParser does that already (i.e. buffering).
I checked the source code of the CSVParser, and look what's in the constructor.
public CSVParser(final Reader reader, final CSVFormat format, final long characterOffset, final long recordNumber)
throws IOException {
...
this.lexer = new Lexer(format, new ExtendedBufferedReader(reader));
...
}
It wraps some kind of buffered reader by default. So, there's no need to add one yourself.

StreamDecoder vs InputStreamReader when reading malformed files

I came across some strange behavior with reading files in Java 8 and i'm wondering if someone can make sense of it.
Scenario:
Reading a malformed text file. By malformed i mean that it contains bytes that do not map to any unicode code points.
The code i use to create such a file is as follows:
byte[] text = new byte[1];
char k = (char) -60;
text[0] = (byte) k;
FileUtils.writeByteArrayToFile(new File("/tmp/malformed.log"), text);
This code produces a file that contains exactly one byte, which is not part of the ASCII table (nor the extended one).
Attempting to cat this file produces the following output:
�
Which is the UNICODE Replacement Character. This makes sense because UTF-8 needs 2 bytes in order to decode non-ascii characters, but we only have one. This is the behavior i expect from my Java code as well.
Pasting some common code:
private void read(Reader reader) throws IOException {
CharBuffer buffer = CharBuffer.allocate(8910);
buffer.flip();
// move existing data to the front of the buffer
buffer.compact();
// pull in as much data as we can from the socket
int charsRead = reader.read(buffer);
// flip so the data can be consumed
buffer.flip();
ByteBuffer encode = Charset.forName("UTF-8").encode(buffer);
byte[] body = new byte[encode.remaining()];
encode.get(body);
System.out.println(new String(body));
}
Here is my first approach using nio:
FileInputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream(new File("/tmp/malformed.log"));
read(Channels.newReader(inputStream.getChannel(), "UTF-8");
This produces the following exception:
java.nio.charset.MalformedInputException: Input length = 1
at java.nio.charset.CoderResult.throwException(CoderResult.java:281)
at sun.nio.cs.StreamDecoder.implRead(StreamDecoder.java:339)
at sun.nio.cs.StreamDecoder.read(StreamDecoder.java:178)
at java.io.Reader.read(Reader.java:100)
Which is not what i expected but also kind of makes sense, because this is actually a corrupt and an illegal file, and the exception is basically telling us it expected more bytes to be read.
And my second one (using regular java.io):
FileInputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream(new File("/tmp/malformed.log"));
read(new InputStreamReader(inputStream, "UTF-8"));
This does not fail and produces the exact same output as cat did:
�
Which also makes sense.
So my questions are:
What is the expected behavior from a Java Application in this scenario?
Why is there a difference between using the Channels.newReader (which returns a StreamDecoder) and simply using the regular InputStreamReader? Am i doing something wrong with how i read?
Any clarifications would be much appreciated.
Thanks :)
The difference between the behaviour actually goes right down to the StreamDecoder and Charset classes. The InputStreamReader gets a CharsetDecoder from StreamDecoder.forInputStreamReader(..) which does replacement on error
StreamDecoder(InputStream in, Object lock, Charset cs) {
this(in, lock,
cs.newDecoder()
.onMalformedInput(CodingErrorAction.REPLACE)
.onUnmappableCharacter(CodingErrorAction.REPLACE));
}
while the Channels.newReader(..) creates the decoder with the default settings (i.e. report instead of replace, which results in an exception further up)
public static Reader newReader(ReadableByteChannel ch,
String csName) {
checkNotNull(csName, "csName");
return newReader(ch, Charset.forName(csName).newDecoder(), -1);
}
So they work differently, but there's no indication in documentation anywhere about the difference. This is badly documented, but I suppose they changed the functionality because you'd rather get an exception than have your data silently corrupted.
Be careful when dealing with character encodings!

Base64 InputStream to String

I have been trying to get an input stream reading a file, which isa plain text and has embeded some images and another files in base64 and write it again in a String. But keeping the encoding, I mean, I want to have in the String something like:
/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEAYABgAAD/2wBDAAoHBwgHBgoICAgLCgoLDhgQDg0NDh0VFhEYIx8lJCIf
IiEmKzcvJik0KSEiMEExNDk7Pj4+JS5ESUM8SDc9Pjv/2wBDAQoLCw4NDhwQEBw7KCIoOzs7Ozs7
I have been trying with the classes Base64InputStream and more from packages as org.apache.commons.codec but I just can not fiugure it out. Any kind of help would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Edit
Piece of code using a reader:
BufferedReader br= new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(bodyPart.getInputStream()));
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
String line;
while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
sb.append(line);
}
br.close();
Getting as a result something like: .DIC;ÿÛC;("(;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;ÿÀ##"ÿÄ
Have you tried doing this:
final byte[] bytes64bytes = Base64.encodeBase64(IOUtils.toByteArray(is));
final String content = new String(bytes64bytes);
A text file containing some base64 data can be read with the charset of the rest of the file.
Base64 encoding is a mean to encode bytes in a limited set of characters that are unchanged with almost all char encodings, for example ASCII or UTF-8.
Base64 isn't a charset encoding, you don't have to specify you have some base64 encoded data when reading a file into a string.
So if your text file is generally UTF-8 (that's probable), you can read it without problem even if it contains a base64 encoded stream. Simply use a basic reader and don't use a Base64InputStream if you don't want to decode it.
When opening a file with a reader, you have to specify the encoding. If you don't know it, I suggest you test with the probable ones, like UTF-8, US-ASCII or ISO-8859-1.
If you have a normal InputStream object than You can directly get Base64 encoded stream from it using apache common library class Base64InputStream constructor
I found the solution, inspired by this post getting base64 content string of an image from a mimepart in Java
I think it is kind of stupid decode and encode again the base64 code, but it is the only way I found to manage this issue. If someone could give a better solution, it would be also really appreciated.
Thanks

UTF8 convertion for text obtained from internet

ElasticSearch is a search Server which accepts data only in UTF8.
When i tries to give ElasticSearch following text
Small businesses potentially in line for a lighter reporting load include those with an annual turnover of less than £440,000, net assets of less than £220,000 and fewer than ten employees"
Through my java application - Basically my java application takes this info from a webpage , and gives it to elasticSearch. ES complaints it cant understand £ and it fails. After filtering through below code -
byte bytes[] = s.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
s = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");
Here £ is converted to �
But then when I copy it to a file in my home directory using bash and it goes in fine. Any pointers will help.
You have ISO-8895-1 octets in bytes, which you then tell String to decode as if it were UTF-8. When it does that, it doesn't recognize the illegal 0xA3 sequence and replaces it with the substitution character.
To do this, you have to construct the string with the encoding it uses, then convert it to the encoding that you want. See How do I convert between ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 in Java?.
UTF-8 is easier than one thinks. In String everything is unicode characters.
Bytes/string conversion is done as follows.
(Note Cp1252 or Windows-1252 is the Windows Latin1 extension of ISO-8859-1; better use
that one.)
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(file), "Cp1252"));
PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(
new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream(file), "UTF-8"));
response.setContentType("text/html; charset=UTF-8");
response.setEncoding("UTF-8");
String s = "20 \u00A3"; // Escaping
To see why Cp1252 is more suitable than ISO-8859-1:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252
String s is a series of characters that are basically independent of any character encoding (ok, not exactly independent, but close enough for our needs now). Whatever encoding your data was in when you loaded it into a String has already been decoded. The decoding was done either using system default encoding (which is practically ALWAYS AN ERROR, do not ever use system default encoding, trust me I have over 10 years of experience in dealing with bugs related to wrong default encodings) or the encoding you explicitely specified when you loaded the data.
When you call getBytes("ISO-8859-1") for a String, you request that the String is encoded into bytes according to ISO-8859-1 encoding.
When you create a String from a byte array, you need to specify the encoding in which the characters in the byte array are represented. You create a string from a byte array that has been encoded in UTF-8 (and just above you encoded it in ISO-8859-1, that is your error).
What you want to do is:
byte bytes[] = s.getBytes("UTF-8");
s = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");

Java App : Unable to read iso-8859-1 encoded file correctly

I have a file which is encoded as iso-8859-1, and contains characters such as ô .
I am reading this file with java code, something like:
File in = new File("myfile.csv");
InputStream fr = new FileInputStream(in);
byte[] buffer = new byte[4096];
while (true) {
int byteCount = fr.read(buffer, 0, buffer.length);
if (byteCount <= 0) {
break;
}
String s = new String(buffer, 0, byteCount,"ISO-8859-1");
System.out.println(s);
}
However the ô character is always garbled, usually printing as a ? .
I have read around the subject (and learnt a little on the way) e.g.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4508058
http://www.ingrid.org/java/i18n/utf-16/
but still can not get this working
Interestingly this works on my local pc (xp) but not on my linux box.
I have checked that my jdk supports the required charsets (they are standard, so this is no suprise) using :
System.out.println(java.nio.charset.Charset.availableCharsets());
I suspect that either your file isn't actually encoded as ISO-8859-1, or System.out doesn't know how to print the character.
I recommend that to check for the first, you examine the relevant byte in the file. To check for the second, examine the relevant character in the string, printing it out with
System.out.println((int) s.getCharAt(index));
In both cases the result should be 244 decimal; 0xf4 hex.
See my article on Unicode debugging for general advice (the code presented is in C#, but it's easy to convert to Java, and the principles are the same).
In general, by the way, I'd wrap the stream with an InputStreamReader with the right encoding - it's easier than creating new strings "by hand". I realise this may just be demo code though.
EDIT: Here's a really easy way to prove whether or not the console will work:
System.out.println("Here's the character: \u00f4");
Parsing the file as fixed-size blocks of bytes is not good --- what if some character has a byte representation that straddles across two blocks? Use an InputStreamReader with the appropriate character encoding instead:
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(
new FileInputStream("myfile.csv"), "ISO-8859-1");
char[] buffer = new char[4096]; // character (not byte) buffer
while (true)
{
int charCount = br.read(buffer, 0, buffer.length);
if (charCount == -1) break; // reached end-of-stream
String s = String.valueOf(buffer, 0, charCount);
// alternatively, we can append to a StringBuilder
System.out.println(s);
}
Btw, remember to check that the unicode character can indeed be displayed correctly. You could also redirect the program output to a file and then compare it with the original file.
As Jon Skeet suggests, the problem may also be console-related. Try System.console().printf(s) to see if there is a difference.
#Joel - your own answer confirms that the problem is a difference between the default encoding on your operating system (UTF-8, the one Java has picked up) and the encoding your terminal is using (ISO-8859-1).
Consider this code:
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
byte[] data = { (byte) 0xF4 };
String decoded = new String(data, "ISO-8859-1");
if (!"\u00f4".equals(decoded)) {
throw new IllegalStateException();
}
// write default charset
System.out.println(Charset.defaultCharset());
// dump bytes to stdout
System.out.write(data);
// will encode to default charset when converting to bytes
System.out.println(decoded);
}
By default, my Ubuntu (8.04) terminal uses the UTF-8 encoding. With this encoding, this is printed:
UTF-8
?ô
If I switch the terminal's encoding to ISO 8859-1, this is printed:
UTF-8
ôô
In both cases, the same bytes are being emitted by the Java program:
5554 462d 380a f4c3 b40a
The only difference is in how the terminal is interpreting the bytes it receives. In ISO 8859-1, ô is encoded as 0xF4. In UTF-8, ô is encoded as 0xC3B4. The other characters are common to both encodings.
If you can, try to run your program in debugger to see what's inside your 's' string after it is created. It is possible that it has correct content, but output is garbled after System.out.println(s) call. In that case, there is probably mismatch between what Java thinks is encoding of your output and character encoding of your terminal/console on Linux.
Basically, if it works on your local XP PC but not on Linux, and you are parsing the exact same file (i.e. you transferred it in a binary fashion between the boxes), then it probably has something to do with the System.out.println call. I don't know how you verify the output, but if you do it by connecting with a remote shell from the XP box, then there is the character set of the shell (and the client) to consider.
Additionally, what Zach Scrivena suggests is also true - you cannot assume that you can create strings from chunks of data in that way - either use an InputStreamReader or read the complete data into an array first (obviously not going to work for a large file). However, since it does seem to work on XP, then I would venture that this is probably not your problem in this specific case.

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