Java – JSON character encoding

character encodingjavajsonspring-mvc

My Java web application submits an AJAX request that returns JSON such:

{'value': 'aériennes'}

When 'aériennes' is displayed in the webpage, it appears as 'a�riennes', so I guess there's some kind of character encoding problem. The AJAX response headers include

Content-Type    application/json

which doesn't appear to include any charset information. I guess this needs to be changed to something like

Content-Type    text/html; charset=iso-8859-1      (or charset=utf8)

The server-side of the app is Spring MVC, and I guess there must be a way to set the default charset for each response?

Best Answer

The symptoms indicate that the JSON string which was originally in UTF-8 encoding was written to the HTTP response using ISO-8859-1 encoding and the webbrowser was instructed to display it as UTF-8. If it was written using UTF-8 and displayed as ISO-8859-1, then you would have seen aÃ©riennes. If it was written and displayed using ISO-8859-1, then you would have seen aï¿½riennes.

To fix the problem of the JSON string incorrectly been written as ISO-8859-1, you need to configure your webapp / Spring to use UTF-8 as HTTP response encoding. Basically, it should be doing the following under the covers:

response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");

Don't change your content type header. It's perfectly fine for JSON and it is been displayed as UTF-8.

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eval() is not necessary. This will work fine:

var date = new Date(parseInt(jsonDate.substr(6)));

The substr() function takes out the /Date( part, and the parseInt() function gets the integer and ignores the )/ at the end. The resulting number is passed into the Date constructor.

I have intentionally left out the radix (the 2nd argument to parseInt); see my comment below.

Also, I completely agree with Rory's comment: ISO-8601 dates are preferred over this old format - so this format generally shouldn't be used for new development.

For ISO-8601 formatted JSON dates, just pass the string into the Date constructor:

var date = new Date(jsonDate); //no ugly parsing needed; full timezone support

Json – Can comments be used in JSON

No.

The JSON is data only, and if you include a comment, then it will be data too.

You could have a designated data element called "_comment" (or something) that should be ignored by apps that use the JSON data.

You would probably be better having the comment in the processes that generates/receives the JSON, as they are supposed to know what the JSON data will be in advance, or at least the structure of it.

But if you decided to:

{
   "_comment": "comment text goes here...",
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}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Jquery – How to format a Microsoft JSON date

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