Question

I am writing a small app that retrieves some html from a web server based on some variables in the http POST. The HTML data that comes back has a <pre> section in it with some words that are spaced out nicely using newline and tab characters but my app does not receive them. The code is as follows

HttpPost post = new HttpPost("REMOVED FOR PRIVACY");

    try {
        // Add your data
        List<NameValuePair> nameValuePairs = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
            //REMOVED FOR PRIVACY

        post.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs));

        // Execute HTTP Post Request
        HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(post, httpContext);
        String htmlBrief = inputStreamToString(response.getEntity().getContent()).toString();
        return htmlBrief;
        }

I think it might be how I am reading the response by putting it through a BufferedReader like so

private StringBuilder inputStreamToString(InputStream is) throws IOException {
    int c;
    StringBuilder total = new StringBuilder();

    // Wrap a BufferedReader around the InputStream
    BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is));

    // Read response until the endIndex
    while ((c = rd.read()) != -1) { 
        total.append((char)c); 
    }

    // Return full string
    return total;
}

I thought it might be because I was reading in line by line in the buffered reader so I switched to one character at a time but it didn’t help the problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Ben

Answer 1

Use Charles or Fiddler to inspect what is actually sent in the HTTP request body.

Most likely problems:

• Mismatching character sets for client & server;
• Failure to decode the URL encoded body.