CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaencodingservletscharacter-encoding
Pablo Fernandez
Pablo Fernandez

Reputation: 105220

Change encoding of HttpServletResponse

I have an API that returns XML, it actually returns it using the default encoding (I believe it's UTF-8), but now requirements have changed and we need to return everything in UTF-16LE.

My question is: is there an easy way of doing this? I have access to the response just before the calls complete so I was wondering if I could do something like

//This method does not exist
response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-16LE");

Thanks a lot!

UPDATE: The method mentioned is the one to use. I was using an old version (2.3) of the servlet API that did not include it. Changing the version fixed it all.

Upvotes: 19

Views: 82367

Answers (5)

Derek Wade
Derek Wade

Reputation: 746

I found that you MUST set the character encoding to at least UTF-8 because the default is ISO-8859-1. The ISO-8859-1 character set doesn't account for some extended characters. I wrote a helper function to use what is sent in the "Accept" header:

public static void setResponseCharacterSet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
{
    String type = "UTF-8";
    if(request.getHeader("accept") != null)
    {
        String[] params = request.getHeader("accept").split("charset=");
        if(params.length == 2) {
            type = params[1];
        }
    }
    response.setCharacterEncoding(type);
}

Upvotes: 1

Muhammad Nuruddin
Muhammad Nuruddin

Reputation: 1

just do the following thing:

byte[] k =xml.getBytes("UTF-16"); // xml is the string with unicode content.  getBytes("UTF-16") encodes given String into a sequence of bytes and returns an array of bytes. you can use xml.getBytes(UTF8_CHARSET); for utf-8 encoding

response.setContentType("text/xml");
response.setContentLength(k.length);
response.getOutputStream().write(k);
response.getOutputStream().flush();
response.getOutputStream().close();

Upvotes: -2

Tim Cooper
Tim Cooper

Reputation: 10468

As others have stated, use either:

response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-16LE");

or:

response.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml; charset=UTF-16LE");

...but make sure you do this before calling response.getWriter(); ...!

Upvotes: 16

skaffman
skaffman

Reputation: 403501

Uhh, the method does exist, here

Sets the character encoding (MIME charset) of the response being sent to the client, for example, to UTF-8. If the character encoding has already been set by setContentType(java.lang.String) or setLocale(java.util.Locale), this method overrides it. Calling setContentType(java.lang.String) with the String of text/html and calling this method with the String of UTF-8 is equivalent with calling setContentType with the String of text/html; charset=UTF-8.

Upvotes: 21

Jonathan Feinberg
Jonathan Feinberg

Reputation: 45324

First

response.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml; charset=UTF-16LE");

Then, make sure you're actually emitting that encoding!

Upvotes: 9

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