Uploading an UTF-8 text file in Blackberry

Question

I am trying to upload an UTF-8 text file to a server in Blackberry. The upload works great but when I check the file in the server it's an ASCII file and what I need is an UTF-8 file.

This is the code that I use when I create the file:

FileConnection fc = (FileConnection)Connector.open(fileName);
if (!fc.exists()){
    fc.create();
}
long byteOffset = fc.usedSize();
OutputStream outStream = fc.openOutputStream(byteOffset);           
outStream.write(line.getBytes("UTF-8"));
outStream.close();
fc.close();

To send the file I use this:

public void run (){

    httpConnection = null;
    _connectionURL = null;
    String lineEnd = "\r\n";
    String twoHyphens = "--"; 
    String boundary = "*****";  
    int rc = -1;
    OutputStream os = null;

    try {

        _connectionURL = Constants.UPLOAD_URL + getConnectionString();

        httpConnection = (HttpConnection)Connector.open(_connectionURL);
        byte [] postDataBytes = getData();

        httpConnection.setRequestMethod("POST");
        httpConnection.setRequestProperty("Connection", "Keep-Alive"); 
        httpConnection.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "BlackBerry");
        httpConnection.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "multipart/form-data;boundary=*****");                        
        httpConnection.setRequestProperty(HttpProtocolConstants.HEADER_CONTENT_LANGUAGE, "en-US");
        httpConnection.setRequestProperty(HttpProtocolConstants.HEADER_CACHE_CONTROL,"no-cache, no-store, no-transform");           

        os = httpConnection.openOutputStream();
        os.write((twoHyphens + boundary + lineEnd).getBytes());
        os.write(("Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"uploadedfile\";filename=\"" + fileName +"\"" + lineEnd).getBytes());
        os.write(lineEnd.getBytes());
        os.write(postDataBytes);
        os.write(lineEnd.getBytes());
        os.write((twoHyphens + boundary + twoHyphens + lineEnd).getBytes());
        os.flush(); 


        // Response
        rc = httpConnection.getResponseCode();
        InputStream in = httpConnection.openInputStream();
        int ch;
        StringBuffer stringBuffer = new StringBuffer();
        while( ( ch = in.read() ) != -1 ){
            stringBuffer.append( (char)ch );
        }            
        String responseString = stringBuffer.toString();

        ...

    }catch (IOException ioe){
       ...
    }
}

...

private byte[] getData() throws IOException {
    int _c;
    StringBuffer _stringBuffer = new StringBuffer("UTF-8");
    FileConnection fileForUpload = (FileConnection) Connector.open(Constants.FOLDER_FILES+this.fileName, Connector.READ);
    this.fileInputStream = fileForUpload.openDataInputStream();
    this.postData = new URLEncodedPostData("UTF-8", false);
    while( (_c = this.fileInputStream.read()) != -1){
        _stringBuffer.append((char)_c);         
    }
    postData.setData(_stringBuffer);
    byte [] _postData = postData.getBytes();
    fileForUpload.close();
    return _postData;
}

I guess there is something wrong in getData() method or in the httpConnection properties, but i don't know what is it.

Thanks for your help

Answer 1

Look at this code, which appears twice:

while( ( ch = in.read() ) != -1 ){
    stringBuffer.append( (char)ch );
}

That's treating each byte as a separate character, effectively in ISO-8859-1.

If you really want to convert the content to text, you should be using an InputStreamReader with an encoding of UTF-8, then ideally reading blocks of characters (rather than one character at a time).

This isn't helping either:

byte [] _postData = postData.getBytes();

That will be using the platform default encoding to convert a string to bytes - that's almost never what you want.

Given that your getData method is trying to read a file as a byte array , you shouldn't be converting it to text at all, IMO. If you know the file length beforehand, you should just create a byte array of the right size and repeatedly call InputStream.read(byte[], int, int) , noting the return value to see how far you've read. If you don't, you can repeatedly read into a smallish buffer, then write the data you've just read into a ByteArrayOutputStream which you can later get the byte array from.

Additionally, you don't appear to ever close any of your streams - which you should do in finally statements, so that the streams are closed even if an exception is thrown.

Answer 2

In addition to Jon Skeet's answer.

To read byte array from file you can simply use net.rim.device.api.io.IOUtilities :

FileConnection fileForUpload = 
        (FileConnection) Connector.open(path, Connector.READ);
InputStream stream = fileForUpload.openInputStream();
byte[] data = IOUtilities.streamToBytes(stream);