UTF-8, Unicode, XML and windows problems

Question

Hi there,
I'm developing an application which uses a lot of russian text.
This russian text is stored in XML and can be sent to a server remotly
I use the standard javax.xml libaries to parse the xml files and DBunits XMLWriter to write generate XML strings.
The XML returned by the DBunit stuff is UTF-8, but its inside a UTF-16 string.
So when I generate xml and print it out I get something that looks like the following:
��������� ������������ ���������?����Thats ok, beacause I can stick that streight into a file when writing files and it works.
But the problem comes when sending the XML over the server.
The sending implentation I use must be able to send java generated utf-16 and xml read utf-8.
So I convert the XML from utf-8 to utf-16, using the following:
byte[] stringBytesISO = isoString.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
utf8String = new String(stringBytesISO, "UTF-8");And that works perfectly on my linux system.
However when I run it on windows, it only seems to convert some of the characters
Привычным �?ном за�?нут дороги до ве�?ны,Does anyone know whats going wrong here?

Answer 1

jammers1987 wrote:
I use the standard javax.xml libaries to parse the xml files and DBunits XMLWriter to write generate XML strings.DbUnit is a testing tool; are you saying you're using it in a production system? Ideally, you should use the same library to write the XML as you do to read it, but you definitely shouldn't be using DbUnit in this context.
The XML returned by the DBunit stuff is UTF-8, but its inside a UTF-16 string. That should never happen. XML is just text, and text can either be in the form of a Java string, or it can be stored externally using a text encoding like UTF-8. Never mind that Java strings use the UTF-16 encoding; you don't need to know or mention that. Encodings only come into play when you're communicating with something outside your program, like a file system or a database.
When you generate the XML, you specify that the encoding is UTF-8. When you read the XML, you specify that the encoding is UTF-8. That's all.