GluonConnect REST library mangles non-English characters in a JSON string

Question

I have the following method which retrieves a JSON string from a remote REST API. The JSON string contains French characters. The problem is that the French text in the JSON string is mangled.

I am using the GluonConnect REST client library to fetch the JSON string from the remote server. Everything is fine except for the retrieval of JSON with non-English text.

Here is my method:

public void retrieveJsonString() {
  // GluonConnect RestClient setup
  RestClient restClient = RestClient.create().host(this.host).path(this.path).queryParam("schema", this.schema).queryParam("uri", "/contactsform").method("GET");
  // GluonConnect GluonObservableObject setup
  GluonObservableObject<String> godp = DataProvider.retrieveObject(restClient.createObjectDataReader(String.class));
  // Add a listener to the GluonObservableObject
  godp.stateProperty().addListener(new InvalidationListener() {
    @Override
    public void invalidated(Observable arg0) {
      if (godp.getState().equals(ConnectState.SUCCEEDED)) {
        response.bind(godp.asString());
      }
    }
  });
}

The key line is response.bind(godp.asString()). godp.AsString() returns mangled text. For example, the word "Médiateur" with an accented é is displayed as "MÃ©diateur". If I change the line to response.bind(godp.asString(Locale.FRANCE, null)), then nothing is returned.

Please what am I doing wrong? Thanks a lot for your kind assistance.

What's the encoding of the incoming string? Make sure you read the string using that encoding. if you don't know, I would start with UTF8. — SedJ601, Jul 02 '19 at 15:04
Thanks Sedrick. I think it is UTF8; but how do I read the string using the UTF8 encoding? — JDaniel, Jul 02 '19 at 15:11
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/i18n/text/string.html — SedJ601, Jul 02 '19 at 15:57
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5729806/encode-string-to-utf-8 — SedJ601, Jul 02 '19 at 15:58

JDaniel · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-04T13:17:26.250

Thanks a lot for your suggestions, I finally got it to work by bypassing the StringInputConverter class in the GluonConnect library. I wrote a new slightly modified class based on the StringInputConverter class as shown below:

public class MyCustomStringInputConverter extends InputStreamInputConverter<String> {

private static final Logger LOGGER = Logger.getLogger(StringInputConverter.class.getName());

@Override
public String read() {
  try (StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter()) {
    try (
      BufferedReader reader =
          new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(getInputStream(), Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
      BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(stringWriter)) {
    boolean firstWrite = true;
    String line;
    while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
      if (firstWrite) {
        firstWrite = false;
      } else {
        writer.newLine();
      }
      writer.write(line);
    }
  }

  return stringWriter.toString();
  } catch (IOException ex) {
    LOGGER.log(Level.SEVERE, "La lecture du flux d'entrée à échoué.", ex);
    return null;
  }
 }

}

All I did was change BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(getInputStream())) to BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(getInputStream(), Charset.forName("UTF-8"))).

I then used it my retrieveJsonString method as follows:

  public void retrieveJsonString() {

  // RestClient setup
  RestClient restClient =
    RestClient.create().host(this.host).path(this.path).queryParam("schema", this.schema)
        .queryParam("uri", "/contactsform").method("GET");


  MyCustomStringInputConverter converter = new MyCustomStringInputConverter();

  // GluonObservableObject setup
  GluonObservableObject<String> godp =
    DataProvider.retrieveObject(restClient.createObjectDataReader(converter));

  // Add a listener to the GluonObservableObject
  godp.stateProperty().addListener(new InvalidationListener() {
    @Override
    public void invalidated(Observable arg0) {
      if (godp.getState().equals(ConnectState.SUCCEEDED)) {
        response.bind(godp.asString()); 
      } else if (godp.getState().equals(ConnectState.FAILED)) {
        exceptionMsg.set(godp.getException().getMessage());
      }
      }
  });

}

GluonConnect REST library mangles non-English characters in a JSON string

1 Answers1