[Geotools-gt2-users] Encoding problems

[Andreas P. <pa...@ro...>]

Hi,

I've got a pretty weird problem here with geotools 2.1.0 and a wfs.

I'm trying to execute a wfs query from a java servlet, the servlet get's 
  a string via AJAX that is used in the query. The problem is that this 
string is encoded in 3 different encodings on 3 different systems:

System A: Linux/tomcat runs in UTF-8 locale, Java String is encoded in UTF-8
System B: Windows XP, Java String is encoded in UTF-8
System C: Linux/tomcat runs in LC_CTYPE=de_DE@euro everything else is 
POSIX, the Java String seems to be encoded in UTF-8 twice, i.e. I get 4 
bytes for every non-ascii character.

The real problem is, that I can't use SystemA and SystemC to query a 
geoserver wfs, they won't find any feature with non-ascii name. It works 
on System B out of the box, though. The geoserver always runs on the 
same machine in a different tomcat, the postgis database uses LATIN1 
encoding and querying the geoserver from php using mapbender is no problem.

I tried first with a simple decode from UTF-8 like this:

decodedParam = Charset.forName("utf-8").decode(input.getBytes()).toString();

Doing this results in the following string on the 3 systems:

System A: No change at all, decodedParam == input, i.e. UTF-8 encoded
System B: decodedParam is now encoded in latin1, it can be read in a 
debugger as is (i.e. I see german umlauts as usual)
System C: decodedParam is now a latin1 string with 2 question marks at 
the place where I had 4 bytes before.

Putting this string into a LikeFilter results in

System A: No return values
System B: An encoding exception because geotools sends an xml request to 
geoserver with declared encoding UTF-8 but used encoding for this string 
is latin1
System C: Everything that has 2 characters at the place where a german 
umlaut was given in the form (i.e. for Lün it would return features with 
the names Linne, Leon...)

I always thought Java strings would be using Unicode codepoints instead 
of bytes, but it seems I was wrong.

I'm running out of options here, so if anybody could shed some light 
onto this, please?

Andreas

-- 
Andreas Pakulat
Computer Graphics Center (ZGDV e. V.)
Joachim-Jungius-Str. 11
18059 Rostock
GERMANY
mail: and...@ro...