Write and transform to String XML

Question

I have a big trable.
I dinamicly generate XML File and try to transform it to String. I use standart toString() method for root Element of XML Document.
My data are in Windows-1251 encoding, but result String is in UTF-8 encoding.
When I write dinamicly generated XML Document in File.
I set encoding Windows-1251, but result is in UTF-8.
PLEASE HELP ME!!!!!

Answer 1

Well, regarding file encodings Java has a history and so does MS-Windows. I don't know all the details for the Russian (let's rather use the term Cyrillic from now on) encodings but I went through a similar problem with German and iso-8859-1 encoding. The problem was similar in that some characters above 127 got displayed as '?'.
Java uses a default encoding which changed in versions later than 1.1.7 from iso-8859-1 to CP1252 (I assume that for Cyrillic that translates to iso-8859-5 and cp1251, respectively).
Windows and DOS have a whole list of changes with respect to Cyrillian encodings: CP855, CP866 and finally CP1251, which is incompatible with both iso-8859-5 and ISO-IR-111 (aka KOI8).
Since your characters are displayed as '?' it's very unlikely you'll see a UTF-8 encoding in your output file (with all due respect), it rather seems to be a mismatch between one of the iso encodings and CP1251, that's my guess.
Anyways, let me describe my problem a bit, and hopefully you can deduce a solution for yours.
My XML file contained character 129 (that's a u with two dots on top) and displaying as well as writing that character to a file put a '?' in its place. DOS ASCII editors (as well as older Windows editors) use iso-8859-1 and display and input character 129 correctly and when I used JSDK1.1.6 everything was fine. Now, Java assumes CP1251 and by forcing it to use iso-8859-1 I got input and output working just fine.
Since I don't have a Cyrillic Windows version at my disposal I can't find out which encoding will work for you, but it has to do with the default encoding Java is using, not so much with the XML and its parsing.
You can use the following test program to find out what the correct settings are. Play with the encoding settings (CP8xx, iso-8859-5, CP1251) until both input and output files are identical and contain the correct characters.
import java.io.*;
class x{
   public static void main(String[] args)
      try
         InputStreamReader  isr = new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream("ascii.txt"), "iso-8859-1");
         OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream("ascii_out.txt"), "iso-8859-1");
         char[] buf=new char[1024];
         int n;
         while((n=isr.read(buf,0,1024))!=-1)
            osw.write(buf,0,n);
         isr.close();
         osw.close();
      catch(Exception e)
         e.printStackTrace();
}If you still have problems, please provide more information:
1. encoding attribute you're setting in the XML file
2. the default file encoding of your Java version (a system property) + JSDK version
3. XML parser vendor + version
4. What you exactly mean by "transform" (XSLT ? just outputting ?)
5. Some code samples might help, too.
Hope that helps,
Good luck.
P.S.
Here are some links for info on character sets and encodings:
http://czyborra.com/charsets/codepages.html
http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html