Characters not getting translated correctly

Question

I have written code that basically sends a URL to AltaVista's Babelfish translator, which translates the text that I send into whatever language I specify. In my case, I'm going from English to Spanish, translating the phrase "How are you?" When I get the result back, the special character of the "o" with the accent is not printing correctly. I'm getting garbage back in the stream itself. However, if I take that same URL and plop it directly into IE, it works perfectly.
Another thing that I have tried is copying the HTML that Babelfish creates with the correct characters into a text file, then reading that file directly into Java to see if it might be some sort of problem with the URLConnection, but the java still produces the garbage.
I have also tried to change my system properties to make it think that it is a Spanish locale, but still no luck. In addition, I've tried UTF-8 and UTF-16. It seems like it is reading in double-byte characters and returning the wrong byte for the special characters.
One last thing I tried was setting the "Content-Language" in the setRequestProperty() method for the URLConnection, but that didn't seem to have any effect.
Here is the URL that I building and sending:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr?lp=en_es&tt=urltext&intl=l&doit=done&urltext=How are you?
Here is the full code, sorry it's a little lengthy, but I thought it would help.
import java.util.*;
import java.util.regex.*;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLConnection;
import java.net.URLEncoder;
import java.io.DataOutputStream;
import java.io.DataInputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.BufferedReader;
class Translator {
public static String translate(String message, String fromto) throws Exception {
String messageHeader = null;
String translatedMessage = null;
String thisFromTo = fromto;
String[] fromTo = breakupFromTo(thisFromTo);
if(fromTo[0].equals(fromTo[1])){
return message;
if(message.indexOf("<") != -1){
messageHeader = message.substring(message.indexOf("<"),message.indexOf(">")+1);
translatedMessage = message.substring(message.indexOf(">")+1);
message = translatedMessage;
} else {
messageHeader = "";
translatedMessage = message;
URL transUrl = new URL("http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr");
URLConnection conn = transUrl.openConnection();
conn.setDoInput(true);
conn.setDoOutput(true);
conn.setUseCaches(false);
conn.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
DataOutputStream printout = new DataOutputStream(conn.getOutputStream());
String content = "lp=" + URLEncoder.encode(thisFromTo, "UTF-8") + "&tt=urltext&intl=l&doit=done&urltext=" +URLEncoder.encode(message, "UTF-8");
printout.writeBytes(content);
printout.flush ();
printout.close ();
// Get response data.
DataInputStream input = new DataInputStream (conn.getInputStream());
BufferedReader binput = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
String str;
String buff = "message could not be translated";
while (null != ((str = binput.readLine()))){
Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile("^.*<Div style=padding:10px; lang=(.*)>(.*)</div>.*$").matches(str);
if(matcher.matches()){
buff = matcher.group(2);
buff = messageHeader + " " + buff;
return buff;
private static String[] breakupFromTo( String fromto) {
StringTokenizer t = new StringTokenizer(fromto, "_");
String from = t.nextToken();
String to = t.nextToken();
String[] fromTo = {from, to};
return fromTo;
public static void main(String args[]){
String str = "How are you?";
String thisFromTo = "en_es";
try{
String translation = translate(str, thisFromTo);
System.out.println(translation);
} catch(Exception e){}

Answer 1

I found my answer, I needed to replace this line
BufferedReader binput = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
with
BufferedReader binput = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream(),"UTF-8"));
And it works like a charm!