Question

I’m reading some information from an external server where I have no access and I don’t know the encoding and I’ve having some problems with characters like í. What I do is a POST request using the code below and afterwards, I parse it.

String response = "";
URL url = new URL(pURL);
URLConnection uc = url.openConnection();
if (sid!=null) uc.setRequestProperty("Cookie", sid);
uc.setDoOutput(true);
OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(uc.getOutputStream());
osw.write(request);
osw.flush();
InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(uc.getInputStream(), "UTF8");
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(isr);
String content;
while ((content = br.readLine())!=null){
  response += content;
}
br.close();
osw.close();

At this moment, if I print the string it shows a \\, I mean, for í instead of appearing \u00ed appears \\\u00ed and if I convert the response string to a char array, I can see that instead of converting it correctly, it’s divided into 6 chars \\\\, u, 0, 0, e, d.

I’ve tried to change encoding where the InputStreamReader is, to replace characters and some regex and none did work. Did anyone have this problem and can help me?

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Not sure why the response is formatted that way, but you could convert strings with \u00ed into í using StringEscapeUtils as follows:

String input = "\\u00ed";
String unescaped = StringEscapeUtils.unescapeJava(input);
System.out.println(unescaped);

Output:

í