What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]
Sunday January 08, 2006
Character Set Encoding Detection in Java The levers and dials of character set encoding can be overwhelming, just looking at the matrix supported by J2SE 1.4.2 gives me vertigo. Java's encoding conversion support is simple enough, if not garrulous:
String iso88591String = request.getParameter("q");
String utf8String = new String(iso88591String.getBytes("UTF-8"));
But what do you do if you don't know what encoding you're dealing with to begin with? It looks as though there are a couple of ways to do it:
- Rome has implemented character set encoding detection into it's XmlReader class
- There's a SourceForge Java port of the Mozilla encoding detector
- The J2SE kit comes with an interesting encoding detector and converter that works with common Japanese encodings. If it's one of Shift JIS, EUC-JP, or ISO 2022 JP but you're not sure which, use JISAutoDetect and you'll get a unicode string back:
String q_unknown_japanese = request.getParameter(q); String q_unicode = new String(q_unknown.getBytes("ISO8859_1"),"JISAutoDetect"); - Did I miss something? That seems to be the story so far but if there are more (and better) options available, I'd sure like to know about it.
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