Question

I have a problem with encoding in JLabel on Windows(on *nix OSes everything is okay).
Here’s an image: https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ti4Qr.png (the problematic character is the L with ` on the top, it should be ł) and here the code:

public void run()
    {
            URL url;
            HttpURLConnection conn;
            BufferedReader rd;
            String line;
            String result = "";
            try {
                url = new URL(URL);
                conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
                conn.setRequestMethod("GET");
                rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
                while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null) {
                    result += line;
                }
                rd.close();
            } catch (Exception e) {
                try
                {
                    throw e;
                }
                catch (Exception e1)
                {
                    Window.news.setText("");
                }
            }
                Window.news.setText(result);
        }

I’ve tried Window.news.setText(new String(result.getBytes(), "UTF-8"));, but it hasn’t helped. Maybe I need to run my application with specified JVM flags?

Answer 1

You are breaking the data before it gets to the window when you use new InputStreamReader with no explicit charset. this will use the platform default charset, which is probably cp1252 on windows, hence your broken characters.

if you know the charset of the data you are reading, you should specify it explicitly, e.g.:

new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream(), "UTF-8")

in the case of downloading data from an arbitrary url, however, you should probably be preferring the charset in the ‘Content-Type’ header, if present.