Question

Okay, so what I’m trying to do is create a java program that uses data obtained from a web service. I can get the data, but it’s in the format of an XML document, and when I print it to the (Eclipse) console, there are spaces between every letter and the replaceAll method doesn’t work. The relevant part of the code is below.

BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new URL(webAdress).openStream()));
String XMLcode = reader.readLine();
XMLcode = XMLcode.concat(reader.readLine());
XMLcode = XMLcode.replaceAll(" ", "");
System.out.println(XMLcode); //in the finished program, I will do something with the data in the XML document.

The results look like this-

þÿ < ? x m l  v e r s i o n = " 1 . 0 " e n c o d i n g = " U T F - 8 " ? >

followed by the actual data I’m looking for. Some internet searches implied that the þÿ meant that this was a text-encoding problem, but all methods I could find for converting UTF-8 into UTF-16 did not help (they do, however, change the þÿ into ??). Does anybody have any idea how to fix this, or know of a “standard” way to read XML that does not require it available in a file?

NOTE- I did not make the web service in question, and as such cannot modify it and don’t really know how it works.

Answer 1

Maybe is a good idea try with:

new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new URL(webAdress).openStream(), "UTF-16"));

you can use the following code to test it:

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.Reader;

public class CharsetChanging {

    public static void main(final String[] args) throws IOException {

        File infile = new File("/tmp/utf16.txt");

        FileInputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream(infile);

        Reader in = new InputStreamReader(inputStream, "UTF-16");

        int read;

        while ((read = in.read()) != -1) {
            System.out.print(Character.toChars(read));
        }

        in.close();
    }
}

just replace new FileInputStream(infile) with new URL(webAdress).openStream()