Sending special characters (ë ä ï) in POST body wi

Question

Im currently working on an Android app with heavy server side communication. Yesterday I got a bug report saying that the users aren't able to send (simple) special characters such as ëäï.

I searched but didn't find anything helpful Possible duplicate ( without answer ): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12388974/android-httpurlconnection-post-special-charactes-to-rest-clint-in-android

My relevant code:

public void execute(String method) {
        HttpsURLConnection urlConnection = null;
        try {
            URL url = new URL(this.url);
            urlConnection = (HttpsURLConnection) url.openConnection();
            urlConnection.setRequestMethod(method);
            urlConnection.setReadTimeout(30 * 1000);
            urlConnection.setDoInput(true);

            if (secure)
                urlConnection.setRequestProperty("Authorization", "Basic " + getCredentials());

            if (body != null) {
                urlConnection.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/json; charset=UTF-8");


                urlConnection.setFixedLengthStreamingMode(body.length());
                urlConnection.setDoOutput(true);
                DataOutputStream dos = new DataOutputStream(urlConnection.getOutputStream());
                dos.writeBytes(body);
                dos.flush();
                dos.close();
            }

            responseCode = urlConnection.getResponseCode();
            message = urlConnection.getResponseMessage();

            InputStream in = null;

            try {
                in = new BufferedInputStream(urlConnection.getInputStream(), 2048);
            } catch (Exception e) {
                in = new BufferedInputStream(urlConnection.getErrorStream(), 2048);
            }

            if (in != null)
                response = convertStreamToString(in);

        } catch (UnknownHostException no_con) {
            responseCode = 101;
        }catch (ConnectException no_con_2){
            responseCode = 101;
        }catch(IOException io_ex){
            if(io_ex.getMessage().contains("No authentication challenges found")){
                responseCode = 401;
            }else
                responseCode = 101;
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } finally {
            if (urlConnection != null)
                urlConnection.disconnect();
        }
    }

body is a String ;-)

Hope we can solve this together

UPDATE:

Tried:

---

writeUTF()

need a server capable of understanding the modified UTF-8

---

byte[] buf = body.getBytes("UTF-8");
dos.write(buf, 0, buf.length);

strings work but no special chars

update: Got it working with StringEntity(* string, "UTF-8") then parse the result to a byte[] and write it with dos.write(byte[])!

--

Answer 1

i am not totally sure buy try this utility for your case URLEncoder.encode(string, "UTF-8")

Answer 2

Setting the encoding of the StringEntity did the trick for me:

StringEntity entity = new StringEntity(body, "UTF-8");

seen here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5819465/570168