Char Set Issue

Question

Hi Guys,
I have an issue with reading some binary data (BLOB) from the a database. The field contains a huge string with a series of line feeds (new line indicators) in the middle. Now I retrieve the info from database and display the string on screen, but the screen shows the string displayed as one long line. I have a feeling I am not using the right character set, but I am not entirely sure what to do. The code looks like this;
if(rs != null){
                    while(rs.next()){
                          InputStream bodyOut = rs.getBinaryStream("STMT_INFO_BLOB");
                        if(bodyOut != null){
                            // Get bytes from the BLOB using a stream
                            BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(bodyOut));
                            String c;
                            //append the data to a string buffer
                           while((c = br.readLine()) != null){
                                infoStr.append(c);
               System.out.println(infoStr.toString());Displaying the String on screen is on the first part of my application. I want to send the string as an array of bytes to another application. However, I want to preserve the line feeds when converting to the byte array and sending it through. I would really appreciate some advice on what I need to do to achieve this.
Thank You

Answer 1

Aegis1888 wrote:
Ahhh, okay. thank you very much. That works fine except some of the characters in the string are displayed with a question mark (?) or other obscure mark. I'm assuming this means that I'm using the wrong encoding. Any idea on how i can find out what the correct encoding for the data should be?My first guess would be that the console is using an encoding that's not compatible with your program's output. On my Windows machine for example, text that I write to the console is encoded as cp1252 by default, but the console tries to decode it as cp437. I suggest you forget about the console; just write the text to a file in an encoding of your choice, then read the file with a good text editor (in other words, something other than Windows Notepad).
I'm a bit confused about character encodings. If I create a byte array and populate it with the value of the blob field in the database, will it preserve the data? Does is change the data in anyway? Does a byte array use any character encodings? If you read it as bytes and write it as bytes, nothing should change. Encodings only come into play when you convert the bytes to a string.
What I suppose I'm asking is does converting from one encoding to another encoding result in any data loss?If both encodings support all of the characters in your text, no data will be lost. But in the example above, if I try to write any characters that aren't in the seven-bit ASCII range, those characters will be decoded incorrectly or replaced with a default character (which usually gets rendered as a question mark).
By the way, if you haven't read [Spolsky's Unicode Primer|http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html] yet, I recommend you do so.