Reading Java servlet bytes from stream on C# client

Question

I'm having issues reading in bytes sent by a Java servlet to a client written in C#.

C# Code

            HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://path.to/servlet");
            req.Method = "POST";
            req.ContentType = "text/html";

            HttpWebResponse res = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();
            Stream respStream = res.GetResponseStream();
            byte[] re = new byte[512];
            respStream.Read(re, 0, re.Length);
            MessageBox.Show(Encoding.Default.GetString(re));

Java Code

public void doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException{
    ServletOutputStream resp = response.getOutputStream();
    try{
        resp.write(new String("Test String").getBytes());
    }
    catch(Exception e){
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}

I realize that there are differences between Java bytes, and C# bytes (signed vs unsigned), but I have no clue how to stream java's signed bytes into something that c# can recognize. Any ideas? Do I need to tweak something on the servlet as far as how I send the information, or does the C# bit need to be modified?

Answer 1

The quickest thing to do is in your C# code specify the encoding, instead of

Encoding.Default.GetString(re)

You should be able to use,

System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1252).GetString(re)

According to the Wikipedia entry on Windows-1252 it is a superset of ISO-8859-1 (the Java default character encoding). You might consider explicitly using UTF-8 on both sides,

System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(re)

and in Java,

new String("Test String").getBytes("UTF-8")