What exactly returns EntityUtils.toString(response)?

Question

I'm doing my API REST and I saw that in a lot of examples people use EntityUtils.toString(response) to get their response into a String from their GET , POST , PUT and DELETE methods. Similar to this:

HttpGet method = new HttpGet(url);
method.setHeader("content-type", "application/json");
HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(method);
String responseString = EntityUtils.toString(response.getEntity());

PLEASE AVOID ANSWERS THAT SAID TO ME THAT IT GIVES TO ME A STRING

I know that it returns to me a String with the content of an entity (in this case the response) but here is where my doubts come, because I'm not secure about what this String returns. I saw it into the official documentation.

Read the contents of an entity and return it as a String.

https://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-core-ga/httpcore/apidocs/org/apache/http/util/EntityUtils.html#toString(org.apache.http.HttpEntity,java.lang.String)

It is the content-type what is returned in the String ?

On the contrary, are the values that I'm getting with my method what are returned in the String ?

I think it is the second one question but I'm not secure about that. And, in the case it is true, how this values are stored into the String ? Are they separated by comas or some special character?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

An HttpEntity represents the content of the body of an HTTP response. EntityUtils.toString(HttpEntity) interprets that content as a String and returns it to you.

If your HTTP response is something like this

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 80

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root>
    <nested attr="whatever" />
</root>

Then the String returned by EntityUtils.toString(HttpEntity) will simply contain

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root>
    <nested attr="whatever" />
</root>

Answer 2

Beware the default charset of EntityUtils.toString :

Get the entity content as a String, using the provided default character set if none is found in the entity. If defaultCharset is null, the default " ISO-8859-1 " is used.

org.apache.http.util.EntityUtils.toString(response.getEntity, "UTF-8");