JAX-RS Jersey Read entity with Content-Type “*”

Question

I am using Jax-RS to make a request to a server, which just returns a one word String, and read that response into a String variable. The issue is that I have no idea how to use the response, as its Content-Type is *; charset=UTF-8 *; charset=UTF-8 (I verified this using Postman). Jax-RS has difficulty parsing this kind of header. Here is my code:

MultivaluedMap<String, String> formData = new MultivaluedHashMap<String, String>();
formData.add("username", username);
formData.add("target", "10");
Response response = target.request().accept(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_TYPE).post(Entity.form(formData));
String responseString = response.readEntity(String.class);

This POST request works. I get an actual Response that I can inspect. However, when I try to read this response into a String (last line of code), the following error is thrown:

org.glassfish.jersey.message.internal.HeaderValueException: Unable to parse "Content-Type" header value: "*; charset=UTF-8" ! at
org.glassfish.jersey.message.internal.InboundMessageContext.exception(InboundMessageContext.java:338) ! at
org.glassfish.jersey.message.internal.InboundMessageContext.singleHeader(InboundMessageContext.java:333) ! at
org.glassfish.jersey.message.internal.InboundMessageContext.getMediaType(InboundMessageContext.java:446) ! at
org.glassfish.jersey.message.internal.InboundMessageContext.readEntity(InboundMessageContext.java:869)

How do I make Jax-RS properly read this kind of Content-Type?!?

Answer 1

I do not think there is any way to get Jersey / Jax-RS to properly read that kind of Content-Type. A solution for any kind of Response that has a Content-Type that Jax-RS does not like is to simply remove the header and (if needed) add your own Content-Type header that is more appropriate for the Response. Do this BEFORE trying to read the Response entity. This fixed my issue:

response.getHeaders().remove("Content-Type");
response.getHeaders().add("Content-Type", "text/plain");
String responseString = response.readEntity(String.class);