UTF-8 and SJIS problems on Android and Sockets

Question

I'm working on a chat app for both Android and for PCs, which communicates with each other using sockets. The problem is that although I need the app to be workable with Japanese, the Android side makes character code problems.

The server works on a PC, and everything goes fine when all clients are on PCs, so I tried to do all the encoding/decoding on the Android side. On both clients, I tried System.getProperty("file.encoding");

and found out that the PC uses Shift_JIS and Android uses UTF-8. So I did

//on the Android output
OutputStream output = socket.getOutputStream();
PrintWriter writer = new PrintWriter(output);
writer.println(new String(msg.getBytes(), "Shift_JIS"));
writer.flush();

//on the Android input
InputStream input = socket.getInputStream();
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(input));
String line = reader.readLine();
String lineDec = new String(line.getBytes("Shift_JIS"), "UTF-8");

but still got the character code problems.

I've tried changing "Shift_JIS" and "UTF-8" for each other but still didn't work... If you have any advices I'd be very happy. Thank you!

Answer 1

Why are you calling String.getBytes()? You can create an OutputStreamWriter / InputStreamReader and specify the charset with the constructor. This will take care of string to byte stream conversion using the appropriate charset. Simply explicitly specify UTF-8 on both sides. Something like:

OutputStream output = socket.getOutputStream();
OutputStreamWriter writer = new OutputStreamWriter(output, "UTF-8");
writer.println("message");