Using boilerpipe to extract non-english articles

Question

I am trying to use boilerpipe java library, to extract news articles from a set of websites. It works great for texts in english, but for text with special characters, for example, words with accent marks (história), this special characters are not extracted correctly. I think it is an encoding problem.

In the boilerpipe faq, it says "If you extract non-English text you might need to change some parameters" and then refers to a paper. I found no solution in this paper.

My question is, are there any params when using boilerpipe where i can specify the encoding? Is there any way to go around and get the text correctly?

How i'm using the library: (first attempt based on the URL):

URL url = new URL(link);
String article = ArticleExtractor.INSTANCE.getText(url);

(second on the HTLM source code)

String article = ArticleExtractor.INSTANCE.getText(html_page_as_string);

Answer 1

You don't have to modify inner Boilerpipe classes.

Just pass InputSource object to the ArticleExtractor.INSTANCE.getText() method and force encoding on that object. For example:

URL url = new URL("http://some-page-with-utf8-encodeing.tld");

InputSource is = new InputSource();
is.setEncoding("UTF-8");
is.setByteStream(url.openStream());

String text = ArticleExtractor.INSTANCE.getText(is);

Regards!