Re: How to slurp/get the content of a URI?

From:

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne@vajhoej.dk>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:14:19 -0400

Message-ID:

<48829f7b$0$90263$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>

Mark Space wrote:

Stefan Ram wrote:

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:

new java.io.InputStreamReader
( httpURLConnection.getInputStream(), "UTF-8" );

A more specific question:

Shouldn't I use the document encoding instead of ?UTF-8??

The default for HTTP is "8859_1" (that's the Java charset name). There's
a special protocol for negotiating a different charset, which you won't
support because your get is to primitive.

The server will either send you 8859.1 if it can, or it'll close the
connection, I think.

What ?

HttpURLConnection and its InputStream fetches bytes from the
server. No negotiations possible.

When the client needs to interpret the bytes it needs to
decide on an encoding.

The code snippet above creates an InputStreamReader expecting
UTF-8 encoding.

If it is known that is the encoding then it is fine. If the encoding
is unknown it should be based on HTTP header and HTML META tag info.

There are no default ISO-8859-1 in neither HTTP or Java. HTTP is
always explicit and Java default is system specific.

Arne