Yes, actualy, the string does have some UTF-8 characters which I am indeed
expecting. I am expecting a combination of Yen currency characters, British
pounds etc...  This is an XML stream that needs to be parsed, modified, and
sent to FOP for PDF generation.

I have allways dealt with SAX parsing with plain Strings, and
that has allways worked, however, I realy did get stuck on this one...  


Regards, Alex.

Soren Kuula <dongfang-remove_this@r...> wrote in message news:<3v3Zc.41993$Vf.2222667@n...>...
> Aleksandar Matijaca wrote:
> > Hi there,
> 
> Hi, I can see you got your problem solved, but are you sure it is 
> _really_ doint what you want it to do (and are you aware what is 
> happening) ?
> 
> Assuming the type of your parameter infile is String:
> 
> Character encoding is the translation between character strings and byte 
> strings. I assume also that whatever made the String infile, it has 
> somehow managed to get the right chars out of the bytes in your file.
> 
> I think that this happens:
> 
> > 		infile = "<?xml version=\"1.0\"
> > encoding=\"UTF-8\"?><display_values><currency_display>\u00A5 Japanese
> > Yen</currency_display></display_values>";
> > 
> > // the above is perfectly valid UNICODE symbol for Yen
> > 
> > 		XMLReader xr = new org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser();
> > 		
> > 		xr.setContentHandler(this);
> > 		xr.setErrorHandler(this);
> > 		ByteArrayInputStream bi = new
> > ByteArrayInputStream
> 
> 1a) (as before): getBytes() returns PLATFORM_DEFAULT-ENCODED byte string 
> representation of your String.(infile.getBytes());
> or
> 1b) (after fix: )getBytes() returns UTF-ENCODED byte string 
> representation of your String.(infile.getBytes());
> 2) Your Reader then correctly DEcodes the byte stream into chars again
> > 		Reader reader = new InputStreamReader(bi,"UTF-8");
> > 		InputSource is = new InputSource(reader);
> 3) the setEncoding statement should really have no effect; the 
> InputSource does not have the challenge of turning bytes into chars as 
> it already has a Reader (a source of chars, as opposed to a Stream 
> (source of bytes) so extract characters from. In other words, the 
> decoding work should have been done already)
> > 		is.setEncoding("UTF-8");
> > 		xr.parse(is);  // CRASHES RIGHT HERE...
> 
> - because  UTF_DECODE(SOME_OTHER_ENCODING_ENCODE(s)) is not necessarily 
> = s for some String s.
> 
> I think you read a file into a String (correctly decoded, maybe by 
> coincidence).
> Then you encode that String (a String is just a sequence of chars) into 
> bytes and decode that back into chars again. No need for that !!
> 
> I suggest you let an InputStream read from your file, and use that 
> InputStream DIRECTLY as an argument to your InputSource. Reason : The 
> InputSource may be clever enough (I think it is) to UNDERSTAND the <?xml 
> encoding="blah"... IN the XML file PROPER. Then it will automagically 
> use the proper decoding.
> 
> If that fails, you may try open a Reader on an InputStream in the file, 
> and then supply the encoding yourself (taking the risk that one day you 
> will prefer to write your XML files in some other encoding, and your 
> program will not work anymore).
> 
> Anyway encoding a String into bytes and then back to a source of chars 
> (a Reader) only adds confusion.
> 
> Soren