Question

I have a feeling I’m doing something wrong here, but I’m not quite sure if I’m missing a step, or am just having an encoding problem or something. Here’s my code:

URL url = new URL("http://api.stackoverflow.com/0.8/questions/2886661");

   BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream()));
   // Question q = new Gson().fromJson(in, Question.class);
   String line;
   StringBuffer content = new StringBuffer();
   while ((line = in.readLine()) != null)
   {
    content.append(line);
   }

When I print content, I get a whole bunch of wingdings and special characters, basically jibberish. I would copy and past it here, but that isn’t working. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

In this case it’s not a character encoding problem, it’s a content encoding problem; you’re expecting text, but the server is using compression to save bandwidth. If you look at the headers when you grab that url, you can see the server you are connecting to is returning gzipped content:

GET /0.8/questions/2886661 HTTP/1.1
Host: api.stackoverflow.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Sat, 22 May 2010 15:51:34 GMT
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
<more headers>
Content-Encoding: gzip
<more headers>

So you either need to use a smarter client like Apache’s HttpClient as stevedbrown suggests (although you need a tweak to get it to speak Gzip automatically), or explicitly decompress the stream you got in your example code. Try this instead for the line where you declare your input:

 BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new GZIPInputStream(url.openStream())));

I’ve verified that this works for the url you are trying to grab.