Sending UTF-8 string using HttpURLConnection

Question

till now I've used the following code snippet in order to send and recieve JSON strings: ``` static private String sendJson(String json,String url){ HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient(); String responseString = ""; try { HttpPost request = new HttpPost(url); StringEntity params =new StringEntity(json, "UTF-8"); request.addHeader("content-type", "application/json"); request.setEntity(params); HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(request); HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity(); responseString = EntityUtils.toString(entity, "UTF-8"); }catch (Exception ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); // handle exception here } finally { httpClient.getConnectionManager().shutdown(); } return responseString; } ``` The code above worked perfect even if the json string contained UTF-8 chars, and everything worked fine. For several reasons I had to change the way I send HTTP post requests and use HttpURLConnection instead apache's HttpClient. Here's my code: ``` static private String sendJson(S…

Accepted Answer

I think the problem is in this part:

```
DataOutputStream outputStream = new DataOutputStream(conn.getOutputStream());
outputStream.writeBytes(json);
outputStream.flush();
outputStream.close();
```

Instead of doing this you need to encode json as UTF-8 and send those bytes which represent the UTF-8 encoding.

Try using this:

```
Charset.forName("UTF-8").encode(json)
```

See:

Charset.encode

An even simpler approach is to use e.g. a `BufferedWriter` wrapping an `OutputStreamWriter`. The `OutputStreamWriter` knows about its own encoding and so it will do the work for you (the encoding work of the `json` String).

```
BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(conn.getOutputStream(), "UTF-8"));
bw.write(json);
bw.flush();
bw.close();
```

Sending UTF-8 string using HttpURLConnection

Solution

Problem