in order to 'feed' a .NET web service from java I do pass xml strings via a direct socket connection over to the server.
Everything works wunderbar as long as I don't include any 'wierd' characters in my xml strings. Ä or ß for examples sake.
I scripted around and figured that in php5 the problem is solved by
utf8_encode(myXmlString). Sadly
retString = new String (retString.getBytes(),"UTF-8");
does not work out.
Any hints would be appreciated.
thx in advance
A
If your XML is correctly encoded, you shouldn't have a problem. My guess is that your XML isn't correct to start with. Rather than working round that, I'd strongly encourage you to fix everything to produce and consume the correct values.
In particular, your retString should already have the correct Unicode values. If it doesn't, you're going to run into problems whatever you do. If it does have the right values, you should be able to just convert it into bytes using the UTF-8 charset, and feed those to the socket - so long as the XML declares itself as being in UTF-8 to start with. (It will default to UTF-8 if you don't specify anything else, so long as it doesn't start with a UTF-16 byte order mark.)
I suggest you have a look at my Debugging Unicode Problems article: check the data at every step, not just by printing out the string but by looking at the individual codepoints within it. Do that at both the Java and .NET sides.
Don't forget that you have 2 levels of encoding here:
