在Java中转换为StringEntity时，如何从字符串中删除编码错误的字符？

Question

I am executing a post request using the org.apache.http library and I am having trouble encoding some characters the correct way. I am using jsoup to pull down text from a web page and then sending this text to an api. My code looks like this

        DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpPost postRequest = new HttpPost(url);

        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
        String jsonString = mapper.writeValueAsString(object);

        StringEntity input = new StringEntity(jsonString);

        input.setContentType("application/json");
        postRequest.setEntity(input);
        HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(postRequest);

The problem is that sometimes the text I am grabbing from these web pages is improperly formatted and normal characters like apostrophes and hyphens are being turned into question marks or other weird punctuation marks when initializing the stringentity class. My question is how can I take the improperly encoded jsonString and encode it properly so that when it is sent in the post request the characters are set to the correct characters. I don't want to remove the apostrophes or hyphens, I want to set them to a proper format like utf-8.

Answer 1

Setting the charset on the StringEntity's constructor fixed this for me (setting content type on the StringEntity after creation didn't!):

import org.apache.http.protocol.HTTP;
...
httpPost.setEntity(new StringEntity(jsonString, HTTP.UTF_8));