Hi, I'm using CXF with JAX-WS, and I do have problems/misunterstandings about character encodings. Here's my problem. Basically :
1. Server may run on different platforms (Linux, Windows, ...) for which default charset encodings are different 2. clients are not necessarily written in Java (I do have one for tests, but also Perl clients) 3. clients run on different platforms with different default encodings 4. @WebMethod String getResult(String aQuestion); 5. both result and question are strings which are actually XML (ex : <question>how are you</question> -> <answer><robot>fine, thank you !</robot></answer>) 6. XML tells its own encoding (through <?xml ... encoding='iso-8859-1'?>) for example So now : - at runtime, in which encoding do I get the "question" ? I use XOM for XML parsing, but (it's not a problem) it takes an InputStream, so I do have to create an inputstream from the question. I'm not really sure that : InputStream in = new BufferedInputStream(new ByteArrayInputStream(question.getBytes())); does the trick because getBytes() will assume that the string is encoded in the system encoding (which may not be true). Futhermore, will it clash with the fact that the string *represents* an XML in another encoding (question may not be expressed in the encoding of the client) - I use a ByteArrayOutputStream and a XOM Serializer for generating an XML response, but I do have to convert it to a String in order to return it to the client. If I do a return out.getBytes("iso-8859-1"), the result string will be, according to my understanding of Java, an UTF-16 encoded string : I just tell the compiler that my bytearrayoutputstream contains bytes in iso-8859-1. Then, the server will send the string to the client using the platform default charset, so either utf-8 (linux) or iso-8859-1 (windows). This could be ok, but I need to be sure that the actual string returned to the client will be an ISO-8859-1 string according to what my result XML header says... I'm feeling the headache close, so any expert help would really be appreciated ! -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Encodings-messup-tf4797821.html#a13726051 Sent from the cxf-user mailing list archive at Nabble.com.