Question

I’m downloading an HTML file and I need to display it with System.out.println().

The problem is that instead of Greek characters I get rubbish.

I’m using to download the code below to download the HTML file:

 URL url = new URL("here goes the link to the html file");
 BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream()));
 String htmlfile = "";
 String temp;
 while ((temp = br.readLine()) != null) {
       htmlfile+= temp;
 }
 System.out.println(htmlfile);

Is it possible to fix this problem? Here is a sample of what I get as a result:

    <title>Ξ Ολη  ΞλΡκΟΟΏΟ ΟΏ δικΟΟΞ±ΞΊΟ ΟΟΟΞΏ</title>

All my regional settings on my computer are fine. I can use System.out.println to display Greek words directly.
I have a feeling I need to change some locale settings in the BufferedReader but I’m not sure how to do it, or whether that’s the correct way of approaching this problem.

Somewhat off topic, I have a feeling the above method of downloading the HTML file is really ineffective. For example, when I use html+=temp, aren’t I basically creating a new String instance every time I read a line from the HTML file? This sounds very costly, if you can please suggest me other methods of doing the same thing that is more effective.

Answer 1

String encoding = "UTF-8"; // Or "ISO-8859-7"
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream(), encoding));

ISO-8859-1 is the 8-bit encoding used by Greek, UTF-8 the multibyte unicode encoding.

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
String temp;
while ((temp = br.readLine()) != null) {
    sb.append(temp).append("\n");
    System.out.println(temp);
}
String html = sb.toString();

readLine removes the line ending (\r old MacOS, \n Unix or \r\n Windows).