Question

In the Android application I have written, there is a portion which allows the user to enter the start and end location of their trip, and a route itinerary is returned. I am using Bing Maps REST services for this. I want the directions returned to be in French.

A sample request: request. This is best seen on a Chrome browser, Safari and Firefox take care of this. You can see that the directions have lots of strange characters where they are not supposed to be. I have tried decoding on the device, by doing:

URLDecoder.decode(obj.optString("text"), HTTP.ISO_8859_1)

which does not work (the response stays the same), which makes sense I think since it has already become the special characters. I cannot use Windows-1252 to decode because Android does not seem to support that.

An example of what I am being sent back: Léger Encombrement. What it should be: Léger Encombrement.

It works perfectly on an iPhone as well, but not on Android. Any suggestions on how I can solve this?

My code in the connection class is:

public static JSONObject getJSONResult(final String url) {

    try {
        final HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
        final HttpGet get = new HttpGet(url);
        final HttpResponse responsePost = client.execute(get);
        final HttpEntity resEntity = responsePost.getEntity();

        boolean DEBUG = true;
        if (DEBUG) {
            Log.d("", "[JSON-ENV] url:  " + url);
        }

        final String str = EntityUtils.toString(resEntity);
        Log.d("connection", "response str: " + str);

        if (resEntity != null) {
            final JSONObject obj = new JSONObject(str);
            Log.d("connection", "JSON RESPONSE IS " + obj);
            return obj;

        } else {
            return null;
        }

    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        return null;
    }

}

Is there something I need to add into my connection class?

UPDATE:

I added the JSON parsing code to format as “ISO_8859_1” as seen at this link: http://p-xr.com/android-tutorial-how-to-parse-read-json-data-into-a-android-listview/ but I still get the same results …

Answer 1

This is JSON. You don’t need to use URLDecoder. The error is before that, probably when you create the String for the JSON Parser. JSON is always in UTF-8 (or 16, rarely)

Can you post the code for reading the server response?

edit

EntityUtils uses ISO_8859_1 as a default Charset if it does not find one in the content. Simply change

final String str = EntityUtils.toString(resEntity);

to

final String str = EntityUtils.toString(resEntity, HTTP.UTF_8);