Special characters between Android application and PHP script

Question

I want to get some text from a PHP page into an Android application. As long as the characters are ASCII (up to 128) there's no problem but when I want to display special characters like 'Ţ', 'Â' (the so called Latin-1 Supplement and/or Latin Extended-A - see it at Unicode Chart) I get weird symbols into my Android application (�).

The problem is that my Android application cannot handle characters from Latin-1 Supplement (which PHP can) but characters from the Latin Extended-A charset (which PHP cannot). I don't know what common charset for both languages to use because the one that Java is able to read PHP is not, and vice versa.

My Java function that gets the content of the PHP page is this:

public static String GetData() {
    byte[] Bresult = null;
    HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
    HttpPost post = new HttpPost("http://www.mypage.com/script.php");
    try {
        List<NameValuePair> nameValuePairs = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(1);
        nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("var", "val"));
        post.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs, "UTF-8"));
        HttpResponse response = client.execute(post);
        StatusLine statusLine = response.getStatusLine();
        if(statusLine.getStatusCode() == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_OK){
            Bresult = EntityUtils.toByteArray(response.getEntity());
            Result = new String(Bresult, "UTF-8");
        }
    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
        Log.w("MYAPP", "Unsupported Encoding Exception (" + e.getMessage() + ")");
    } catch (Exception e) {
        Log.w("MYAPP", "Exception (" + e.getMessage() + ") ocurred");
    }
    return Result;
}

So, this code gives me the content of the script.php page. If the characters of the text received are from 0 to 128 there is no problem. Elsewhere, I get weird characters.

Now, this is my PHP code:

<?php
    header("Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8");
    echo "ÂŞÂĂĒ";
?>

I also have a C++ application and it does read the text correctly. I have been trying a lot of methods all the day and I just don't get it. Who, where, why? Thanks.

Maybe look at this stackoverflow.com/questions/4917860/… and this stackoverflow.com/questions/3098207/… - any help there? — Aerik
– Aerik, Commented Apr 3, 2012 at 18:39
Thanks Aerik. Now I can send them correctly from PHP to Android but not from Android to PHP. Keeping trying... — ali
– ali, Commented Apr 3, 2012 at 20:06

Javier · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-03 18:47:52Z

1

where are you getting the data?, if is through a mysql database you must specify UTF8 like this

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

answered Apr 3, 2012 at 18:47

Javier

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2 Comments

ali Over a year ago

O.K. Javo. I will keep that in mind for when I will get text from the database. For now I just want to get it from a text file. Thanks

Aerik Over a year ago

Be sure of the encoding in your text file, too. Some text editors let you see / set the encoding. Also, I suggest this perhaps naively, have you considered encoding everything in UTF-8? Android uses UTF-8 (stackoverflow.com/questions/4564688/…) and there's plenty of resources for handling UTF-8 with PHP...

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