无法通过json接收utf-8字符到Android

Question

I'm building a simple Android application that sends items by json to a python web service for storage in a sqlite database. This part works fine and when recalled the items have their correct 'åäö' characters.

When I put these items in a json to return to the application (using code below) I'm not so sure any more. Instead of 'ö' I get '\\xc3\\xb6', which I believe would be the utf-8 representation?

    connection = sqlite3.connect('database.db')
    connection.text_factory = str
    cursor = connection.cursor()

    cursor.execute("SELECT item, number FROM Items")
    rows = cursor.fetchall()
    jsobj = []

    for row in rows:
    jsobj.append({'number':row[1], 'item':row[0]})

When I parse the json object in my app I'm not able to turn the '\\xc3\\xb6' back into 'ö'

This is the Android code at work:

    HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
    HttpGet post = new HttpGet(super.url);

    HttpResponse response = client.execute(post);

    HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
    InputStream content = entity.getContent();
    BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(content, "UTF-8"));

    JSONArray itemsOnServer = new JSONArray();
    itemsOnServer = new JSONArray(reader.readLine());
    return itemsOnServer;

Result sent into another function:

    ArrayList<Vara> varor = new ArrayList<Vara>();
    String vara = "";
    int antal;

    for (int i = 0; i < json.length(); i++) {
        JSONObject object;
        try {
            object = json.getJSONObject(i);
            try {
                try {
                    vara = new String(object.getString("vara").getBytes("ISO-8859-1"), "utf-8");
                } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }   System.out.println(vara);
                antal = object.getInt("antal");
                varor.add(new Vara(vara, antal));
            } catch (JSONException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        } catch (JSONException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

    }

    return varor;

Everything works fine except the special characters. Please help, I'm going nuts.

Answer 1

b'\\xc3\\xb6' is a bytestring that can be decoded into Unicode string that contains a single U+00f6 LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS Unicode codepoint :

>>> b'\xc3\xb6'.decode('utf-8')
u'\xf6'

By default text_factory is set to unicode for sqlite3 ie, you should receive Unicode string for TEXT objects if you remove connection.text_factory = str from your code.