Enoding issue of response from a web service for non english characters

Hi,

I am facing an issue in the response recieved from a webservice.
Non english characters like ô ä are coming as ? ? in the xml.

In the schema definition i have this-
"<?xml version='1.0' encoding='ISO-8859-1'?>".
I have changed it encoding to UTF-8 but with no difference.

This issue in particular i am facing in ALSB proxy service.
Did a exhaustive search in the net also.
Highly appreciate any inputs.

Thanks,
Rashmi.

As that XML is served over HTTP the encoding specified in the Content-Type HTTP header is actually more important - it can override the encoding specified in the XML prolog.
See: XML on the Web Has Failed

Rashmi Anand wrote:Non english characters like ô ä are coming as ? ? in the xml.

That may indicate that the real encoding is us-ascii, not UTF-8.
So somewhere your UTF-8 content is being forced into us-ascii encoding so that the non-english characters are replaced with "?".
While us-ascii content can be labeled as UTF-8, us-ascii is not capable of expressing all the characters in UTF-8.

The characters ô and ä have Latin-1 decimal codes of 212 and 196 respectively. You can see it at ISO Latin-1 Character Set. It means that in your case these two characters are most likely encoded as either Latin-1 or UTF-8.

One thing you can try is to catch these characters as you receive them and pass them through a converter.

Please let us know.

Peer, it's disheartening to realize that in the one transmission we can have multiple encoding definitions – HTTP, XML. Does the mime wrapper introduce something as well?

Regards,
Dan

Rashmi,

It would be very nice to capture and see the entire HTTP response message.

To illustrate what Peer said, please have a look at SOAP HTTP Binding. In one example it shows the charset=utf-8 as part of the HTTP header.

Regards,
Dan

Some more examples are at this guide.

For some reason, most of the examples don't use the XML declaration - <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

Regards,
Dan