ResultSet.getString(String) doesn't return the right text from database

Question

Hi everybody,
I'm trying to read some text in Portuguese from a MS-Access database, but the special characters for Portuguese aren't correctly translated by ResultSet.getString(String).
Here's my piece of code:
private static void fetchEquipamentoEstabelecimento()
try
Statement stmt = conn.createStatement();
ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery(
" SELECT Eqp.NumSerie, Eqp.Estabelecimento, Estab.Nome, Estab.Cidade, Eqp.Data, Eqp.LPN " +
" FROM Equipamento Eqp, Estabelecimento Estab " +
" WHERE TabPreco = 23 " +
          " AND Eqp.Estabelecimento = Estab.Estabelecimento " +
"ORDER BY NumSerie DESC");
while(rs.next())
String nome = rs.getString("Nome");
System.out.println(rs.getLong("NumSerie")      + " " +
                         rs.getDate("Data")           + " " +
                         rs.getString("LPN")           + " " +
                         nome                              + " " +
                         rs.getString("Cidade"));
stmt.close();
catch(SQLException ex)
printSQLException("fetchEquipamentoEstabelecimento()", ex);
The output of this piece of code is 1 record joined from tables Equipamento and Estabelecimento:
111222333 2001-12-15 JHK Pal<X>cio Cristal Guarda
where the <X> is the greek letter beta. I was expecting a
portuguese character which is an a with an accent: � (I hope the character was correctly displayed for you)
I tried replacing
String nome = rs.getString("Nome");
with
String nome = new String(rs.getString("Nome").getBytes(),codepage);
with codepage="Cp860" (MS-DOS Portuguese)
and codepage="Cp037" (USA, Canada (Bilingual, French), Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Australia)
but other strange characters were displayed instead of the a with an accent.
In the MS-Access table Estabelecimento, the column Nome has a Data Type of Text.
I'm using:
- JDK 1.2.2
- MS Access 2000 (in Windows 2000)
MS Access 97 (in Windows NT 4.0).
Any help is deeply apreciated.

Answer 1

Hi!
When you establish connection to database, try explicitly give instructions about what encoding use your DB, e.g.:
// connection properties
Properties connInfo = new Properties();
connInfo.put("user", username);
connInfo.put("password", password);
connInfo.put("charSet", "Cp1251"); // enter your codepage!!!
// getconnection
Connection db = DriverManager.getConnection(dataurl, connInfo);