Conversion to ANSI

Question

I have a csv file. i need to display csv file content in html table using jsp. i had written a desired code using open csv. yes, it is sucessfully shown in html table. But some cryptic characters are displayd like " -?- 1 -?- " in the place of "- 1-" where those question marks are unecessary.

I had tried converting values to ansi in the following way to eliminate entry of cryptic characters :

csvReader = new CSVReader(reader);
int rowCount = 1;
while ((line = csvReader.readNext()) != null) {
%>
<tr>
<td class="heading" width="30"><%=rowCount%></td>
<%
for (int i = 0; i < line.length; i++) {
    if (rowCount == 1) {
    %>
    <td class="ex-headding" width="120"><strong><%=line[i]%></strong></td>
    <%
    } else {
        //this is the code to convert into ansi
        String utf = line[i];  
        byte[] data = utf.getBytes("ASCII");  
        line[i] = new String(data);
    %>
    <td><%=line[i]%></td>
    <%
    }
}
%>  

But issue still there . Is that the correct way of conversion into ANSI

Answer 1

Probably you have something like

<%@page pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>

Which is the official Latin-1. Use:

<%@page pageEncoding="Windows-1252"%>

Which is the Windows Latin-1 with some more special characters. All browsers interprete ISO-8859-1 as Windows-1252 (also MacOSX, Linux), and HTML 5 even prescribes it this way. Only java is strict.

Hence you may keep in HTML:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

The question mark is given, when the original Unicode character cannot be represented in the outputting character set.

Should the character still remain unrepresentable, switch to "UTF-8". That is definitely the future, driven by the multi-lingual world, and current Unicode base.

---

As that was not the cause: Check the encoding of the CSV file. For instance with JEdit. And then add the encoding to the CSVReader constructor.

That ensures we have correct Strings to begin with.