Develop Reference

Send utf-8 encoded strings in Android HTTP request

I have made a HTTP-post inside my android application. Values are sent as strings from my app to my webserver. Problem is, the values are not in UTF-8 as I want them to be. My webserver has UTF-8 encoding so I know that there is code inside my app that I need to change.
See my snippet below:
private void sendPostRequest(String facebookId, String name, String email) {
class SendPostReqAsyncTask extends AsyncTask<String, Void, String>{
#Override
protected String doInBackground(String... bcs) {
String bcFacebookId = bcs[0];
String bcName = bcs[1];
String bcEmail = bcs[2];
HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost("URL");
BasicNameValuePair facebookIdBasicNameValuePair = new BasicNameValuePair("bcFacebookId", bcFacebookId);
BasicNameValuePair nameBasicNameValuePair = new BasicNameValuePair("bcName", bcName);
BasicNameValuePair emailBasicNameValiePair = new BasicNameValuePair("bcEmail", bcEmail);
List<NameValuePair> nameValuePairList = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
nameValuePairList.add(facebookIdBasicNameValuePair);
nameValuePairList.add(nameBasicNameValuePair);
nameValuePairList.add(emailBasicNameValiePair);
try {
UrlEncodedFormEntity urlEncodedFormEntity = new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairList);
httpPost.setEntity(urlEncodedFormEntity);
try {
HttpResponse httpResponse = httpClient.execute(httpPost);
InputStream inputStream = httpResponse.getEntity().getContent();
InputStreamReader inputStreamReader = new InputStreamReader(inputStream);
BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(inputStreamReader);
StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
String bufferedStrChunk = null;
while((bufferedStrChunk = bufferedReader.readLine()) != null){
stringBuilder.append(bufferedStrChunk);
}
return stringBuilder.toString();
} catch (ClientProtocolException cpe) {
cpe.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException ioe) {
System.out.println("Second Exception caz of HttpResponse :" + ioe);
ioe.printStackTrace();
}
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException uee) {
System.out.println("An Exception given because of UrlEncodedFormEntity argument :" + uee);
uee.printStackTrace();
}
return null;
}
For an example, the letter 'ö' becomes a '?'. How do I fix this?
Cheers!

The biggest single reason that characters get converted into question marks is the conversion of characters to bytes, and then back into characters, not matching.
The code you have supplied has this line:
InputStreamReader inputStreamReader = new InputStreamReader(inputStream);
This is problematic because you are not specifying how to convert the bytes into characters. Instead you probably want this:
InputStreamReader inputStreamReader = new InputStreamReader(inputStream, "UTF-8");
What you specify for the character encoding will depend upon the character encoding that you have specified elsewhere. Without specifying the character encoding, you will get the "default" character encoding, and that depends upon settings in both the client and the server. Java uses Unicode, and UTF-8 is the only encoding that will preserve all the characters that Java allows.
For debugging, you may want to use the InputStream and retrieve bytes from that, and print out the byte values, in order to verify that they are indeed UTF-8 encoded representations of the original character values. The proper encoding of 'ö' (x00F6) is 'ö' (x00C3 x00B6).
You will also need to assure that the original POST request is properly UTF-8 encoded. The UrlEncodedFormEntity class also uses the default character encoding, which might not be UTF-8. Change this:
UrlEncodedFormEntity uefe = new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairList);
to
UrlEncodedFormEntity uefe = new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairList, "UTF-8");

if database coding is set properly + table coding is set properly + columns coding set properly, then all data are stored properly. That's the first part. Now the second, important part - make sure you have this command after your mysql connection : SET NAMES utf8
This was my case for the same issue. Hope this this will work for you as well.

Error Android - received HTML instead of JSON

I'm working on a Android application and I'm trying to get a JSON response from a server which is configured to return a json object (".../current_user.json") when receives a GET message, but the answer I get is in HTML format and not in JSON format as expected.
I don't understand why is this happening because I did the same requests on the browser and with the program RESTClient and got the right answer in JSON format.
Here is the code I'm using.
JSONObject json = new JSONObject();
HttpParams params = new BasicHttpParams();
HttpConnectionParams.setSoTimeout(params, 10000);
HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient(params);
HttpGet get = new HttpGet(url_getiduser);
HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(get);
String sresponse = "error";
Log.d("url get", url_getiduser);
Log.d("pedido get", get.getMethod());
if(response != null)
{
InputStream in = response.getEntity().getContent();
sresponse = convertStreamToString(in);
Log.d("resposta http", sresponse);
if(!sresponse.equals("error"))
{
JSONObject object = new JSONObject(sresponse);
id_user = (String) object.get("id");
json = object;
Log.d("objecto json", object.toString());
}
else Log.d("Error on json parser", sresponse);

There are few cases where you get HTML text
You might have called a wrong function which gives a 404 page.
Might be a database error on server side where you will get database error message
Server might be sending a styled data which has HTML tags
But you better Log the response and paste it here.

How receive JSON object via HttpClient?

I use HttpClient in android to send post request:
HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpPost request = new HttpPost(hostNameCollection);
StringEntity se = new StringEntity(jsonObj.toString());
request.setHeader("Accept", "application/json");
request.setHeader("Content-type", "application/json");
request.setEntity(se);
HttpResponse response = client.execute(request);
Log.v("HttpLogClient.logJSONObject", "wyslano JSON");
and I'dont know how I can receive JSON object on my Java EE servlet.

you need to read the response body text, then parse as JSON,
String result = EntityUtils.toString(response.getEntity());
JSONObject jo = new JSONObject(result);

read the body of the http post ( server-side ) by getting the a stream object on the body and then reading it.
Once youve read it , convert the bytes to chars and that will be json which you can use to build a json object like a jsonNode using 'jackson' libs.

If you are using plain servlets the json stream is located in the body of the HttpServletRequest : request.getReader() or request.getInputStream();
To make things easier you could use a library handling databinding for you.
Have a look at Genson http://code.google.com/p/genson/.
YouClass object = new Genson().deserialize(request.getReader(), YourClass.class);
// or to a plain map
Map<String, Object> map = genson.deserialize(request.getReader(), Map.class);

JSON parsing in android: No value for x error

Here is the code I'm using inside my AsyncTask
DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpGet request = new HttpGet(url);
request.setHeader("Accept", "application/json");
request.setHeader("Content-type", "application/json");
HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(request);
HttpEntity responseEntity = response.getEntity();
char[] buffer = new char[(int)responseEntity.getContentLength()];
InputStream stream = responseEntity.getContent();
InputStreamReader reader = new InputStreamReader(stream);
reader.read(buffer);
stream.close();
result = new String(buffer);
return result;
This returns a string result and in my onPostExecute method I try to parse that input string:
JSONObject vehicle = new JSONObject(new String(result));
makeEdit.setText(vehicle.getString("make"));
plateEdit.setText(vehicle.getString("plate"));
modelEdit.setText(vehicle.getString("model"));
yearEdit.setText(vehicle.getString("year"));
As soon as it reaches makeEdit.setText it throws an error - no value for make. I'm still very new to android, so don't send death threats if there was some obvious error. The input text is the following JSON string:
{"GetJSONObjectResult":{"make":"Ford","model":"Focus","plate":"XXO123GP","year":2006}}

No value for x error message is pretty common when dealing with JSON. This usually resulted by overlooked code.
usually, when dong JSON, I try to see the human readable structure first. For that, I usually use JSONViewer.
In your case, the structure is something like this:
You see that make is within another object called GetJSONObjectResult. Therefore, to get it, you must first get the container object first:
JSONObject vehicle = ((JSONObject)new JSONObject(result)).getJSONObject("GetJSONObjectResult");
//a more easy to read
JSONObject container = new JSONObject(result);
JSONObject vehicle = container.getJSONObject("GetJSONObjectResult");
and finally use the object to get make:
makeEdit.setText(vehicle.getString("make"));
plateEdit.setText(vehicle.getString("plate"));
modelEdit.setText(vehicle.getString("model"));
yearEdit.setText(vehicle.getString("year"));

Your JSON Object contains itself a JSONObject. To acces to your data, you have to do like this:
vehicle.getJSONObject("GetJSONObjectResult").getString("make");

Setting TextView's text as non-English text received from JSON response

I'm getting back names of (Foursquare) venues from a server call where the names of the venues returned can be in English or non-English.
Assume the venue name is in a JSON object as follows:
{...
"name":"venue name which can be in any language"
...}
I'm creating a JSONObject from this response and then pulling out the name of the venue as follows:
String name = jsonObject.getString("name");
Lastly, I'm setting the TextView's text to show the name of the venue as follows:
myTextView.setText(name);
I'm finding however for Arabic names that where the Arabic characters are joined in the original JSON object (as they should be), the characters that show in the app (i.e. in the TextView) are disjoint. (I'm not too familiar with other languages so can't really tell if they're showing incorrectly too.)
Is there something additional I should be doing to pull out non-English names correctly from the JSON object and setting it as the text of a TextView, or is it down to the phone to decide how the text will be displayed?
Edit: I've tried parsing the server response (as suggested by #bbedward) explicitly specifying the content encoding as UTF-8 as follows...
HttpEntity httpEntity = httpResponse.getEntity();
String responseMessage = EntityUtils.toString(myHttpEntity, "UTF-8");
JSONObject jsonObject = new JSONObject(responseMessage);
... but still no joy. (Arabic characters appear, as before, disjoint in words where they should be joint up.) Could it be a phone thing or is there something extra needing to be done myself to get the words/characters to show proper in non-English languages? Perhaps the server needs to explicitly specify a "Content-Type" header with value "UTF-8"?

I'm going to answer anyway, I'm guessing you aren't getting your json in UTF-8 as i had a similar problem, I believe json won't come any other way.
Complete Example
The only things to concern yourself with this is setting the encoding for the InputStreamReader and creating the JSONObject
private DefaultHttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient(new BasicHttpParams());
HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost("http://myjsonurl.com/search?type=json");
// Depending on your web service
httppost.setHeader("Content-type", "application/json");
try
{
String result = null;
HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httppost);
HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
InputStream inputStream = entity.getContent();
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream, "utf-8"), 8);
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
String line = null;
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null)
{
sb.append(line + "\n");
}
JSONObject myJObject = new JSONObject(sb.toString();
}
catch (Exception e)
{
}
finally
{
try{if(inputStream != null)inputStream.close();}catch(Exception none){}
}

add this line when you connect to mysql:
mysql_set_charset('utf8', $con);
ex:
$con = mysql_connect(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD);
mysql_set_charset('utf8', $con);
mysql_select_db(DB_DATABASE);