Question

I am trying to send a public key over SMS.

So far I convert the byte[] to a String using:

String message = new String(ByteArray, "iso-8859-1");

The public key looks like this(when sent):

0I0
*†H†÷ 8 05 .:y&¯GìL5VØÞ<£  ßÄ´Q•4YŸß ÈW8‰³S›‰_ó4aÀ”[Ù u

but the recipient receives the message like this:

0I0
*?H?? 8 05 .:y&?GìL5VØ?<£ A ?ßÄ?Q?4Y?ß?EW8??S??_o4aA?[U u

Some of characters are being corrupted and replaced with “?” the phone does not recognise them.

Question:
Is there a way of converting “iso-8859-1” to just letters and numbers?
if not does anyone have any other idea?
(maybe another type of encoding?)

Please comment if you would like more details, Thank you.

Answer 1

You can’t convert pure binary data into a String like this, because all the bytes don’t represent a valid character. Use base-64 to convert your byte array to a readable ascii string. Apache commons codec has a free implementation.