Converting cp850 to iso-8859-1

Question

hi there,
I'm having a problem converting between charsets.
I've written the following function:
code:----
private String convertCharset(String data) {
try {
byte[] chars = data.getBytes();
String converted = new String( chars, "Cp850" );
catch ( UnsupportedEncodingException err) {
System.err.println(err);
String converted="";
return converted;
it seemed to work fine...*g*until it met german characters.
By now the only one (the only one I noticed) that doesn't get converted correctly is the letter '�', which becomes an '?'.
The strange thing is that an '?' stays an '?' so I can't just replace those two...kind of weird...
does anybody know a workaround for this ?
thanks

Answer 1

I'm getting data through an JDBC-ODBC bridge from an
foxpro 2.6 database, which returns the data cp850
encoded.
the data is fetched with the ResultSet.getString()
method and written into a 2d String array, so the data
should be cp850 encoded at that point (no ?).No, you still have it backwards. The data in the database should be bytes encoded in CP850, and the JDBC driver should -- if it is working correctly and the database is working correctly -- should convert those bytes to a String, using the CP850 charset.
(Every time you think "... and this String is encoded in..." you are off track.)
Then im calling the script I've posted here to convert
it to unicode (?).
Then I'm escaping the String for inserting it into an
INSERT Query, building the query and executing it.
So calling the ResultSet.getBytes() instead of the
ResultSet.getString() method and then calling your
function will fix this problems ?I suppose you ask this because you are, in fact, not getting the correct data from the database and the driver. This would not surprise me. I would guess that something like this:byte[] bytes = rs.getBytes(n);
String data = new String(bytes, "CP850");might work. That tells the driver to return the bytes from the database as they are, and then you convert them from a CP850 array of bytes to a string. Try that first to see if it works. Then if it does, you can move on to the INSERT problem.
That problem is: when you do INSERT of a String, the driver and database are likely not going to use CP850 in this case either. That is good and bad news: the good news is that data that you write from Java using INSERT can likely be read back using ResultSet.getString() with no problem. But the bad news is that the data already in the database can't, so you don't want that to happen. You can experiment with ü to see if the problem exists; if it does you need to do something like this:PreparedStatement ps = conn.prepareStatement("INSERT table fields(name) values(?)");
byte[] bytes = yourString.getBytes("CP850");
ByteArrayInputStream is = new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes);
ps.setBinaryStream(1, is, bytes.length);
ps.executeUpdate();
Sorry I'm asking, I'm a desperate C programmer working
with Java for 4 days (3 hours writing the
Synchronization program, the rest trying to fix this
problem)Yes, this is an annoying complication for non-Java programmers. You're doing pretty well for a beginner.