Converting String to Android JSONObject loses utf-8

Question

I am trying to get a (JSON formatted) String from a URL and consume it as a Json object. I lose UTF-8 encoding when I convert the String to JSONObject.

This is The function I use to connect to the url and get the string:

private static String getUrlContents(String theUrl) {
    StringBuilder content = new StringBuilder();
    try {
        URL url = new URL(theUrl);
        URLConnection urlConnection = url.openConnection();
        BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(urlConnection.getInputStream()));

        String line;
        while ((line = bufferedReader.readLine()) != null) {
            content.append(line + "\n");
        }
        bufferedReader.close();
    } catch(Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    return content.toString();
}

When I get data from server, the following code displays correct characters:

String output = getUrlContents(url);
Log.i("message1", output);

But when I convert the output string to JSONObject the Persian characters becomes question marks like this ??????. (messages is the name of array in JSON)

JSONObject reader = new JSONObject(output);
String messages = new String(reader.getString("messages").getBytes("ISO-8859-1"), "UTF-8");
Log.i("message2", messages);

Answer 1

You're telling Java to convert the string (with key message) to bytes using ISO-8859-1 and than to create a new String from these bytes, interpreted as UTF-8.

new String(reader.getString("messages").getBytes("ISO-8859-1"), "UTF-8");

You could simply use:

String messages = reader.getString("messages");

Answer 2

You can update your code as the following:

    private static String getUrlContents(String theUrl) {
        StringBuilder content = new StringBuilder();
        try {
            URL url = new URL(theUrl);
            URLConnection urlConnection = url.openConnection();
            BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(urlConnection.getInputStream(), "utf-8"));

            String line;
            while ((line = bufferedReader.readLine()) != null) {
                content.append(line).append("\n");
            }
            bufferedReader.close();
        } catch(Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

        return content.toString().trim();
    }