Encoding pinyin

Question

I'm currently developing a program in java, and I want to display Chinese pinyin, which I get from a distant website.

But I have the following problem: Chinese pinyin is displayed this way: jiǎ
Whereas it should be displayed this way: jiǎ
(I just typed the same sequence, except I stripped the slashes).

I think the answer to this question is really simple but I'm struggling to find it.

How are you fetching the encoded string and how are you displaying it? — Jason Sperske, Feb 12 '13 at 18:10
With URL, InputStream and then BufferedReader. But even I think the problem can be solved after, because if I type "j i & # 4 6 2 ;" on google (without the slashes), it displays correctly. I think I'm missing something like escaped characters — user2065648, Feb 12 '13 at 18:13
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/994331/java-how-to-decode-html-character-entities-in-java-like-httputility-htmldecode — nhahtdh, Feb 12 '13 at 18:16
Using Simplified Chinese in a string literal like this: `System.out.println("pīnyīn jiǎ");` seems to work. String in Java are all unicode so you don't need to encode them, I think @nhahtdh's comment will lead you in the right direction — Jason Sperske, Feb 12 '13 at 18:17
You can actually write code if it is all numbered entities, but if there are named entities, then I recommend you to use existing library to do the job. — nhahtdh, Feb 12 '13 at 18:18

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:18

The problem is you have an HTML encoded Unicode character and what you want is the decoded version of it. A library like commons-lang3 (part of Apache Commons) will take your HTML encoded string and decode it for Java to display like this:

String decoded = StringEscapeUtils.unescapeHtml("ji&#462;");

You can also escape Unicode characters in Java like this:

String jia = "ji\u01ce";

This clever one-liner will take a Unicode character and show you its escaped form:

System.out.println( "\\u" + Integer.toHexString('ǎ' | 0x10000).substring(1) );

Encoding pinyin

1 Answers1