android - UTF-8 encoding in Volley Requests

Question

In my Android app I am loading json data with a Volley JsonArrayRequest. The data were created by myself and I saved them with Sublime with UTF-8 encoding. When I get the Response and fill my ListView, the texts are not displayed correctly (umlauts). This is what my Request looks like:

JsonArrayRequest request = new JsonArrayRequest(targetUrl,
                new Response.Listener<JSONArray>() {
                    @Override
                    public void onResponse(final JSONArray response) {
                        try {
                            fillList(response);
                        } catch (JSONException e) {
                            e.printStackTrace();
                        }
                    }
                },
                new Response.ErrorListener() {
            @Override
            public void onErrorResponse(VolleyError error) {

            }
        });
        requestQueue.add(request);

When I load the exact same data with this method, all texts are displayed correctly:

final StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
        final HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
        final HttpGet httpGet = new HttpGet(request);
        try {
            final HttpResponse response = client.execute(httpGet);
            final StatusLine statusLine = response.getStatusLine();
            int statusCode = statusLine.getStatusCode();
            if (statusCode == 200) {
                final HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
                final InputStream content = entity.getContent();
                final BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(content));
                String line;
                while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                    builder.append(line);
                }
            } else {

            }
        } catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

So to me it seems like there is no problem with the encoding of my json file. How can I fix this encoding problem in Volley?

Answer 1

If you know that absolutely all of the files you are requesting will be in the UTF-8 format, which it sounds like you do, then you might consider forcing your Volley request to return UTF-8 formatted strings. You could accomplish this by subclassing the standard JSON request. Something like this:

public class Utf8JsonRequest extends JsonRequest<JSONObject> {
    ...
    @Override
    protected Response<JSONObject> parseNetworkResponse (NetworkResponse response) {
        try {
            String utf8String = new String(response.data, "UTF-8");
            return Response.success(new JSONObject(utf8String), HttpHeaderParser.parseCacheHeaders(response));
        } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
            // log error
            return Response.error(new ParseError(e));
        } catch (JSONException e) {
            // log error
            return Response.error(new ParseError(e));
        }
    }
}