Detecting the character encoding of an HTTP POST request

Question

I m building a web service and have a node that accepts a POST to create a new resource   The resource expects one of two content-types - an XML format I ll be defining  or form-encoded variables   The idea is that consuming applications can POST XML directly and benefit from better validation etc   but there s also an HTML interface that will POST the form-encoded stuff   Obviously the XML format has a charset declaration  but I can t see how I detect the form s charset just from looking at the POST   A typical post to the form from Firefox looks like this   POST  path HTTP 1 1 Host  www myhostname com User-Agent  Mozilla 5 0     etc     Accept  text html application xhtml xml      etc     Accept-Language  en-gb en q 0 5 Accept-Encoding  gzip deflate Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1 utf-8 q 0 7   q 0 7 Keep-Alive  300 Connection  keep-alive Content-Type  application x-www-form-urlencoded Content-Length  41  field1 value1 amp field2 value2 amp field3 value3   Which doesn t seem to contain any useful indication of the character set   From what I can see  the application x-www-form-urlencoded type is entirely defined in HTML  which just lays out the  -encoding rules  but doesn t say anything about what charset the data should be in   Basically  is there any way of telling the character set if I don t know the character set the HTML originally presented was   Otherwise I ll have to try and guess the character set based on what chars are present  and that s always a bit iffy from what I can tell

User · Answer

The Charset used in the POST will match that of the Charset specified in the HTML hosting the form   Hence if your form is sent using UTF-8 encoding that is the encoding used for the posted content   The URL encoding is applied after the values are converted to the set of octets for the character encoding

User · Answer

the default encoding of a HTTP POST is ISO-8859-1   else you have to look at the Content-Type header that will then look like  Content-Type  application x-www-form-urlencoded   charset UTF-8   You can maybe declare your form with   lt form enctype  application x-www-form-urlencoded charset UTF-8  gt    or   lt form accept-charset  UTF-8  gt    to force the encoding   Some references    http   www htmlhelp com reference html40 forms form html  http   www w3schools com tags tag form asp

User · Answer

Try setting the charset on your Content-Type   httpCon setRequestProperty   Content-Type    multipart form-data  charset UTF-8  boundary     boundary

[http] Detecting the character encoding of an HTTP POST request

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