Send UTF-8 string from Android to C#

Question

I've been trying to accomplish a simple text transmission from my Android app to my C# server (asmx server), sending the simplest string - and for some reason it never works. My Android code is as following (assume that the variable 'message' holds the string as received from an EditText, which is UTF-16 as far as I'm concerned):

httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpPost post = new HttpPost(POST_MESSAGE_ADDRESS);
byte[] messageBytes = message.getBytes("utf-8");
builder.addPart("message", new StringBody(messageBytes.toString()));
HttpEntity entity = builder.build();
post.setEntity(entity);
HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(post);

So I get something simple for my message, say a 10 bytes array. In my server, I have a function set to that specific address; its code is:

string message = HttpContext.Current.Request.Form["message"];
byte[] test = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(message);

Now after that line the byte array ('test') has the exact same value as the result of the ToString() function I called in the app. Question is, how do I convert it to normal UTF-8 text to display?

Note: I have tried sending the string normally as a string content, but as far as I understood the default coding is ASCII so I got a lot of question marks.

Edit: Now I'm looking for some conversions solutions and trying them, but my question is also if there's a simpler way to do that (perhaps BinaryBody in the android, or different coding?)

Dalija Prasnikar · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-19 20:20:16Z

2

Problem is in following lines:

byte[] messageBytes = message.getBytes("utf-8");
builder.addPart("message", new StringBody(messageBytes.toString()));

First you are transforming your UTF-16 string message into UTF-8 encoded messageBytes only to convert them back to UTF-16 string in next line. And there you are using StringBody constructor that will use ASCII encoding as default.

You should replace those lines with:

builder.addPart("message", new StringBody(message, Charset.forName("UTF-8")));

answered Dec 19, 2015 at 20:20

Dalija Prasnikar♦

28.7k46 gold badges97 silver badges179 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

1 Comment

FitzChivalry Over a year ago

Thank you so much! Very quick and helpful :)

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Send UTF-8 string from Android to C#

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related