FileReader (?) problem

Question

I'm not sure wether this is a problem with the FileReader or Internet Explorer but as other applications seem to have no problems I tend to think its Java.
Anyway, I'm trying to read in a web page, that was saved from the browser, as a String in Java. To do this I'm using the 'FileReader' class but it seems the FileReader has some problems with webpages saved from IE (no problems with Firefox pages though).
Using this code:
try {
     char[] buffer = new char[1024];
     FileReader r = new FileReader(new File("form_ie.html"));
     String result = "";
     while(true) {
          int num = r.read(buffer);
          if(num <= 0) break;
          result += new String(buffer,0,num);
     System.out.println(result);
catch(Exception ex) {
     ex.printStackTrace();
}The result is two strange characters at the start and then every two characters has value (as byte) of 0. Opening this site in notepad/firefox/ie/... gives no problems. Any idea what causes this and what can I do about it? (I'm currently removing char's with a byte value <=0)
The webpage I'm testing can be found on: http://student.kuleuven.be/~s0109731/Rommel/ under the filename "form_ie.html". This webpage was generated using Javascript so there might be no problems for regular webpages.
Now after reading in this webpage, I extract the internal xml block. This xml block is send to a SAXParser but as this SAXParser only accepts InputStreams, I need to turn a String into an InputStream. I found the java.io.StringBufferInputStream class but its deprecated and I can't find an alternative to turn a String into an InputStream. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

It's not generally possible to detect the encoding, no. Some specific patterns (like the byte order marks) might hint at an encoding (in this case UTF-16 - I really didn't mean UTF-8 earlier!), but they would also be perfectly valid characters if the stream were ISO-8859-1 encoded.
XML documents tell you there encoding (in the ?xml processing instruction) - of course, parsers have to do a bit of work to figure out what the byte encoding is before they can read the characters, but given that they're looking for specific patterns, that's pretty straightforward.
HTML documents generally don't self-identify. XHTML documents can (because they're XML). So, for HTML, the web-server normally tells you the character encoding in an HTTP header. But of course, you've already lost this information.
The reasons this is working if saved in FireFox and not IE, is that I expect IE is just saving out what it received whereas FireFox will be translating to your platform's default encoding where possible.
As to your other question, StringBufferInputStream is indeed deprecated in favour of StringReader. But as you said, XML parsers need byte streams, not readers full of characters (because they want to do their own decoding according to the XML PI).
Sun's silly forum software only lets you see the message you are replying to, not the whole thread, so I don't know what you were originally after, but notice that SAXParser also has parse() methods that take Files and InputSources. These may help. Note that an InputSource can be constructed from a Reader (but it mustn't contain a BOM which we've already decided you have).
Also, why read the file into a String? Why not read it into a byte array? This would be the preferred way of dealing with XML. Then you could make a ByteArrayInputStream from the byte[], and wrap that in an InputSource and you aren't mucking with any character encoding stuff outside of the XML.