Question

I’m attempting to parse xml containing foreign letters (æøå specifically), however I’m having problems making parsing them successfully. I don’t get any errors, but the letters are parsed as this; Instead of æ im getting æ, instead of å im getting Ã¥ and instead of ø im getting ø
I also just noticed the char – isn’t displaying properly.
I realise I could do .replaceAll for the 3 letters, but I’m not sure if the problem here its down to me making a mistake somewhere or if its just not possible without going down the route of replaceAll.

The code:

    private Document getDomElement(String xml) {
        Document doc = null;
        DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        try {

            DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();

            InputSource is = new InputSource(new ByteArrayInputStream(
                    xml.getBytes()));
            // is.setCharacterStream(new StringReader(xml));
            is.setEncoding("UTF-8");
            Log.i(TAG, "Encoding: " + is.getEncoding());
            doc = db.parse(is);

        } catch (ParserConfigurationException e) {
            Log.e("Error: ", e.getMessage());
            return null;
        } catch (SAXException e) {
            Log.e("Error: ", e.getMessage());
            return null;
        } catch (IOException e) {
            Log.e("Error: ", e.getMessage());
            return null;
        }
        // return DOM
        return doc;
    }

    private String getValue(Element item, String str) {
        NodeList n = item.getElementsByTagName(str);
        return this.getElementValue(n.item(0));
    }

    private final String getElementValue(Node elem) {
        Node child;
        if (elem != null) {
            if (elem.hasChildNodes()) {
                for (child = elem.getFirstChild(); child != null; child = child
                        .getNextSibling()) {
                    if (child.getNodeType() == Node.TEXT_NODE) {
                        return child.getNodeValue();
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        return "";
    }
}

Let me know if you need to see more code than this.

Appreciate any suggestions – Thanks.

Answer 1

The problem is that you are converting the String argument to bytes using getBytes(). You’d be better off not converting to bytes at all:

InputSource is = new InputSource(new StringReader(xml));

I see that you have that commented out in the code. Is there any reason you don’t want to use it?

If you have to use a byte array, it’s best to do it like this:

InputSource is = new InputSource(new ByteArrayInputStream(
    xml.getBytes("UTF-8")));

On older versions of Android, the default charset depended on the locale.