Question

I am currently trying to extract from an Xml file (that is accessible via this address: http://mobilite.euroairport.com/services/getDepartureAirports?language=French) a list of airports.
My problem is that the ‘Ü’ that should appear in “DÜSSELDORF” is impossible to read (even Ie or firefox directly).
I obtain something like this:
D□SSELDORF or D SSELDORF or D?SSELDORF

The following is the code that I used to try to find the encoding of this file (n is the string that contain “DÜSSELDORF”):

        byte[] bytes = n.getBytes();            
        Log.w("tagtag", (char) bytes[0] + " "+(char) bytes[1]+" "+(char) bytes[2]);
        bytes = n.getBytes("ASCII");            
        Log.w("tagtag", (char) bytes[0] + " "+(char) bytes[1]+" "+(char) bytes[2]);
        bytes = n.getBytes("Cp1252");           
        Log.w("tagtag", (char) bytes[0] + " "+(char) bytes[1]+" "+(char) bytes[2]);
        bytes = n.getBytes("UTF-8");            
        Log.w("tagtag", (char) bytes[0] + " "+(char) bytes[1]+" "+(char) bytes[2]);
        bytes = n.getBytes("ISO8859_1");            
        Log.w("tagtag", (char) bytes[0] + " "+(char) bytes[1]+" "+(char) bytes[2]);
        bytes = n.getBytes("ISO8859_2");

And this is the result (in Logcat for android) :

        10-08 09:41:30.557: W/tagtag(1506): D □ ﾝ
        10-08 09:41:30.557: W/tagtag(1506): D ? S
        10-08 09:41:30.567: W/tagtag(1506): D ﾝ S
        10-08 09:41:30.567: W/tagtag(1506): D □ ﾝ
        10-08 09:41:30.577: W/tagtag(1506): D ﾝ S
        10-08 09:41:30.637: W/tagtag(1506): D ﾝ S

My question is: do I make a mistake while trying to read this string, or is it a problem due to the server?

Answer 1

Definitley server/ (data service) (misconfiguration issue) / bug.

Server returns this line in HTML/XML response:

Content-Type: application/xml;charset=UTF-8\r\n

I just inspected byte dump of the xml, this is how wireshark represents “DSSELDORF”:

D..SSELDORF

in hex dump (see UTF-8 code table for hex value c2 9d):

44 c2 9d 53 53

which would be:

44 - D
53 - S

and
C2 9D

gets interpreted as control character which is also known as non printable character – hence the “missing” U – which also explains your logcat output.