Question

I was trying to download and parse a webpage with foreign (Chinese) characters. I’m not sure whether I should use “utf-8” or something else. But none of these seems to work for me. I used the sample Wikitionary code for getUrlContent().

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.main);
    mText = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.textview1);
    huaren.prepareUserAgent(this);
    String test = new String("fail");

    try {
        test = getUrlContent("http://huaren.us/");
    } catch (ApiException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    byte[] b = new byte[100000];

    try {
          b = test.getBytes("utf-8");
    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    char[] charArr = (new String(b)).toCharArray();
    CharSequence seq = java.nio.CharBuffer.wrap(charArr); 

    mText.setText(charArr, 0, 1000);//.setText(seq);
}

protected static synchronized String getUrlContent(String url) throws ApiException {
    if (sUserAgent == null) {
        throw new ApiException("User-Agent string must be prepared");
    }

    // Create client and set our specific user-agent string
    HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
    HttpGet request = new HttpGet(url);
    request.setHeader("User-Agent", sUserAgent);

    try {
        HttpResponse response = client.execute(request);

        // Check if server response is valid
        StatusLine status = response.getStatusLine();
        if (status.getStatusCode() != HTTP_STATUS_OK) {
            throw new ApiException("Invalid response from server: " +
                    status.toString());
        }

        // Pull content stream from response
        HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
        InputStream inputStream = entity.getContent();

        ByteArrayOutputStream content = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

        // Read response into a buffered stream
        int readBytes = 0;
        while ((readBytes = inputStream.read(sBuffer)) != -1) {
            content.write(sBuffer, 0, readBytes);
        }

        // Return result from buffered stream
        return new String(content.toByteArray(), "utf-8");
    } catch (IOException e) {
        throw new ApiException("Problem communicating with API", e);
    }
}

Answer 1

The charset is defined in the page itself:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=gb2312" /> 

In general, there are 3 ways to specify the encoding of an HTTP-server HTML page:

Content-Type header of HTTP

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Encoding pseudo-attribute in the XML declaration

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

meta tag inside head

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

see Character Encodings for details

So you should try to evaluate each possible declaration in order to find the appropriate encoding. You could try to parse a page with utf-8 and restart if you encounter the Content-Type declaration meta tag.