converting ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 in servlet response

Question

I have a servlet which retrieves data from an Oracle database. The encoding in the database is Latin1. Following code works fine for the browser:

resp.setCharacterEncoding("ISO-8859-1");
resp.getWriter().write(result);

but I need to be able to return UTF-8, like so:

utfResult = ???;
resp.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
resp.getWriter().write(utfResult);

In order to achieve this I have tried many syntaxes, none of which worked.

The system is Tomcat 7 on Java 7. Thank you for your support.

To answer to the request for more detail:

with the first version, all the characters appear fine in the browser but not in the NodeJS program which uses the data.

when I replace the resp.setCharacterEncoding("ISO-8859-1"); with resp.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8"); the character öäüèéà are replaced by ?

Answer 1

Java String is already Unicode text. So the only problem might be that the reading from the database could have gone wrong. Check that.