Question

–Found the solution to my problem, code is updated–

I am having a problem sending German umlauts (öäü) via push-messages to the iPhone.
I am running Java/GWT on Google AppEngine and using UrbanAirship for the push notifications. The following code works perfectly on my mac, the push-notification arrives with the correct German umlauts in it. If I deploy it to the gae-server the German umlauts are not working. So far I found out that on GAE the standard encoding is US-ASCII and with some help here changed the getBytes() and everything else to UTF-8.
The problem is still there, but now the question marks which substituted the umlauts at the iPhone coming now with an “diamond” as background?!

Here comes the method I am using (works fine local, not at GAE):

private Boolean sendNotification(String appKey, String appMasterSecret, String jsonBodyString) {

    try {

        URL url = new URL("https://go.urbanairship.com/api/push/broadcast/");
        HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
        connection.setRequestMethod("POST");
        connection.setDoOutput(true);
        connection.setConnectTimeout(12000);

        String authString = appKey + ":" + appMasterSecret;
        String authStringBase64 = Base64.encode(authString.getBytes("UTF-8"));
        authStringBase64 = authStringBase64.trim();

        connection.setRequestProperty("Content-type", "application/json; charset:utf-8");
        connection.setRequestProperty("Authorization", "Basic " + authStringBase64);

        OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(connection.getOutputStream(), "UTF-8");
        osw.write(new String(jsonBodyString.getBytes("UTF-8"),"UTF-8"));
        osw.close();

        int responseCode = connection.getResponseCode();
        String responseMessage = connection.getResponseMessage();
        if (responseCode == 200)
            return true;


    } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
        return false;
    } catch (ProtocolException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
        return false;
    } catch (IOException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
        return false;
    }
    return false;
}

Answer 1

getBytes() without an encoding! You should be ashamed! Well, not really 🙂

String.getBytes():

Encodes this String into a sequence of bytes using the platform’s default charset, storing the result into a new byte array.

Use getBytes(String) or getBytes(Charset) instead — likely with UTF-8. (Similar issues affect new String(byte[]) and a few other methods.)

Happy coding.