I need to use "ö","ä"."ü" in my program, but java/android won't let me

Question

Hi all, I need my program to send a request to a server. The problem is, the server only recognizes ös,äs und üs, but JAVA and/or Android don't know them. `How can I send a request with a String like "Hermann-Löns" without JAVA/Android "changing" the ö.... Oh and btw., "oe" isn't recognized by the server too, already tried that...

thx for help!

@BalausC:

I changed your code to:

I'm not sure if this is how you refer to the right fields...

String url = "http://busspur02.aseag.de/bs.exe?SID=473A2&ScreenX=1440&ScreenY=900&CMD=CR&DatumT=30&DatumM=4&DatumJ=2010&AbfAnk=Abf&ZeitH=10&ZeitM=45&Intervall=60&Loeschen=%28N%29eue+Suche";
        String charset = "CP1252";
        List<NameValuePair> params = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
        params.add(new BasicNameValuePair("HTO", start_from));
        params.add(new BasicNameValuePair("HT1", destination));
        UrlEncodedFormEntity query = new UrlEncodedFormEntity(params, charset);

            HttpPost post = new HttpPost(url);
            post.setEntity(query);
            InputStream response = new DefaultHttpClient().execute(post).getContent();
            // Now do your thing with the facebook response.

I can't compile because I get an error saying:

The method getContent() is undefined for the type HttpResponse

If I delete getContent() is says:

Type mismatch: cannot convert from HttpResponse to InputStream

One more thing: I use htmlparser (http://htmlparser.sourceforge.net/) to parse the resulting website. How do I access the resulting html site to parse it? Because otherwise I would have to rewrite nearly all of my code to get the results..

Answer 1

To the point, you need to use java.net.URLEncoder with the appropriate character encoding to encode the special characters in request parameters.

String param = URLEncoder.encode("Hermann-Löns", "CP1252");

Ensure that you specify an Accept-Charset: CP1252 header in the HTTP request. For a more complete code example how to fire a HTTP request with correct encoding, check this answer which I posted a hour ago. It also covers a HttpClient example which is also included in Android.