Java Database Encoding Problems

Question

Hi,
I'm developing java under an AIX machine connecting to a DB2/400 database. The DB2/400 database contains records which are in Thai and English characters encoding.
My Java program will have to extract these records and write them to a text file. My problem is, when I try to write the records in Thai characters, it doesn't get encoded right. Please advise me on what to do about my code. I hope anybody can help.
Regards,
Edgardolito

Answer 1

Do you have a proof that your Java Strings contain
the right characters?
I think so. It's just that it's not encodedcorrectly
when it goes to the text file.So if you have some kind of user interface and print
this text, it shows both Thai and English correctly?The AIX machine can read and display Thai and English characters correctly. Actually, I'm developing a console application. No nifty user interfaces. I just flatly write the records to a text file.
What's your platform's default encoding?My platform's (AIX) default encoding is inISO8859_1.
It's locale is in English. I am not allowed tochange
this setting.
What encoding do you use when creating theFileReader?
I'm not using file reader. I just use
resultset.getString() to get the strings from the
database and write it to the text file using a new
BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(File));My mistake, I actually meant FileWriter. So if you
don't state the encoding to be used, platform
encoding will be used (in your case: ISO Latin 1,
which of course has no support for Thai). The
question is, what encoding should be used, as a mix
of both languages can only be handled by Unicode
encoding, e.g. UTF-8 or UTF-16. You could try to use
an OutputStreamWriter based on a FileOutputStream and
encapsulated into the BufferedWriter -- the
OutputStreamWriter can be created for an encoding of
your choice.please give me a sample code on how to do this... My code goes something like this:
BuffereWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(FileWriter(new File("out.txt")));
StringBuffer data = new StringBuffer("");
rs = statement.executeQuery("SELECT thaiField FROM library.table");
while(rs.next()) {
  data.append(new String(rs.getBytes(), "Cp838"));
  bw.write(data.toString());
  bw.newLine();
  bw.flush();
bw.close();I hope you could help. Thanks a lot!