Java convert json string into utf 8 string

Question

I have the below code in my program:

BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
 urlConnection.getInputStream()));
Object obj = null;
try {
 obj = JSONValue.parse(br);
} catch (Exception e) {
 System.out.println(e);
}
response = obj.toString();

The problem is that it's not converting chars like \u... to normal chars. For example i get:

caffË instead of caffè felicit\u2021 instead of felicità

I'm actually using the json-simple api: http://alex-public-doc.s3.amazonaws.com/json_simple-1.1/index.html.

The url connection is to a page that send me a json file.

Any suggest?

• Keppil: Did you try new InputStreamReader(urlConnection.getInputStream(), "UTF-8")?
• Marco Micheli: I tried your solution and now all the \u.... chars are converted into "?"
• soulcheck: works for me. what's exactly your input string?
• soulcheck: try passing -Dfile.encoding="UTF-8" to java.

Answer 1

You need to initialize the input stream reader with UTF charset. Here is what you need to update:

BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(urlConnection.getInputStream(),"UTF-8"));

• Marco Micheli: I tried this, now i'm getting all "?" chars instead of the \u... chars
• Juned Ahsan: Are you printing it on console? If yes then FYI, console wouldnt be able to render your utf-8 output properly
• Marco Micheli: I'm not only printing them on console, but also writing them on a txt file and uploading to a mysql database with utf-8 charset properly set.
• Pablo Lozano: Are you writing them as UTF-8? FileWriter, for example, takes the OS default encoding, which is NOT UTF-8 if you are on Windows. You have to do the same trick to write as you did to read.
• Pablo Lozano: The default character encoding in Java for Mac OS X is MacRoman, see this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_Roman#Application_notes