Question

I am not able to read a UTF-8 characters from the file as bytes.
the UTF-8 characters are displaying as questionmarak(?) while converting to character from the bytes.

Below code snippet shows file reading.

Please tell me how can we read UTF-8 chanracters from a file.
and plz tell me what is the problem with byte array reading process?

public static void getData {

    FormFile file = actionForm.getFile("UTF-8");

     byte[] mybt;
     try 
     {

                byte[] fileContents = file.getFileData();
        StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
        for(int i=0;i<fileContents.length;i++){
            sb.append((char)fileContents[i]);
        }
        System.out.println(sb.toString());
    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
   }

 Output ::??Docum??ents (input file content is : "ÞDocumÿents" , it contains some spanish characters. )

Answer 1

This is the problem:

for(int i=0;i<fileContents.length;i++){
    sb.append((char)fileContents[i]);
}

You’re converting each byte to a char just by casting it. That’s effectively using ISO-Latin-1.

To read text from an InputStream, you adapt it via InputStreamReader, specifying the character encoding.

The simplest way of reading the whole of a file into a string would be to use Guava:

String text = Files.toString(file, Charsets.UTF_8);

Or to convert a byte array:

String text = new String(fileContents, "UTF-8");