Question

I’m developing applications for android devices and had a problem while developing lately.

I needed to get information out of an html-file online, so I made a construct of InputStream and BufferedReader to actually scan the file for information. I splitted my string to actually get my information and tried displaying it with a toast.

Everything works fine and the way I want it to, but everytime a special-characters should be displayed, a questionmark-hash is.

I think it might be a problem of the charset, because the website say in the :

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

How to I get this right?

EDIT :

HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpPost post = new HttpPost(url);
((AbstractHttpClient) httpClient).getCredentialsProvider().setCredentials(new AuthScope(null, -1), new UsernamePasswordCredentials("user","password"));
HttpResponse response;
response = httpClient.execute(post);
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(
    new InputStreamReader(
        response.getEntity().getContent()
    )
);
String line = null;
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
    Toast.makeText(this, line, Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
}

Answer 1

InputStreamReader may actually take a Charset as a second parameter, to indicate, I presume, the character encoding of the stream it’s going to read. Standard-compliant Java implementations are not required to feature the windows-1252 encoding, but I believe it’s quite similar to ISO-8859-1, which you can try as a first workaround to see if it works. There’s also another possibly interesting constructor in the InputStreamReader class, taking a CharsetDecoder as a second parameter (you can create one by invoking Charset.newDecoder), which you may try to use to decode the stream in the encoding you prefer, or perhaps in the system’s default encoding, that you can obtain by invoking Charset.defaultCharset.

See the JavaDoc API documentation for InputStreamReader, Charset and CharsetDecoder for details. Indeed I’m not an expert and I know just a little about encoding and its issues, but I thought it worth to point out the availability of these classes.

You may also check the encoding used for the InputStreamReader by invoking its getEncoding method.