RE: [ICU4J-discussion] Converting form data from an HTTP POST req uest in a servlet

[Johnson, C. <cla...@vi...>]

Technically, ISO-8859-1 does not assign code points 0x80-9f.  I suppose an
eager implementation may refuse to map these code points, although I would
expect it to substitute 0x3f ('?') rather than return nothing.  I'm curious
what you would see if you tried the following; explicitly casting out the
bytes rather than indicating an encoding:


	String original = request.getParameter("original");
	String newString;
	if (request.getCharacterEncoding()==null) {
	            byte[] bytes = new byte[original.length()];
	            for (int i=0; i<original.length(); i++)
					// presuming utf8, all chars <= 0xff
	                        bytes[i] = (byte) original.charAt(i);
	            newString = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");
	}




> -----Original Message-----
> From: RUCH,SCOTT (HP-NewJersey,ex2) [mailto:sco...@hp...]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 9:52 PM
> To: 'icu...@ww...'
> Subject: [ICU4J-discussion] Converting form data from an HTTP POST
> request in a servlet
> 
> 
> 
> Not ICU4J-specific, but I figure there's a few ;-)
> Java I18n / J2EE experts lurking out here that might 
> have an opinion on this:
> 
> One of the ways that people deal with the fact that
> there is no information in the POST request specifying
> the underlying encoding of the form data is to let
> the servlet container apply the default ISO 8859-1
> encoding to the data and then convert to the desired 
> encoding as such:
> 
> newString = new String(original.getBytes("8859_1"), "desiredEncoding")
> 
> I was testing this in a simple JSP with a sampling of
> text from various languages encoded in UTF-8.  I found
> that depending on the original string content, the
> conversion would fail sometimes.  (Failure = zero-length
> string.  I interpret a zero length string as an "trans-coding 
> failure").
> 
> Consequently, I'm suspect of this technique.  Is there
> a reasonable explanation why UTF-8 and ISO 8859-1 are
> incompatible.  Intuitively, it would seem that this
> should always work, but I've observed it failing...
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Scott
> 
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