I've been trying to accomplish a simple text transmission from my Android app to my C# server (asmx server), sending the simplest string - and for some reason it never works. My Android code is as following (assume that the variable 'message' holds the string as received from an EditText, which is UTF-16 as far as I'm concerned):
httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpPost post = new HttpPost(POST_MESSAGE_ADDRESS);
byte[] messageBytes = message.getBytes("utf-8");
builder.addPart("message", new StringBody(messageBytes.toString()));
HttpEntity entity = builder.build();
post.setEntity(entity);
HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(post);
So I get something simple for my message, say a 10 bytes array. In my server, I have a function set to that specific address; its code is:
string message = HttpContext.Current.Request.Form["message"];
byte[] test = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(message);
Now after that line the byte array ('test') has the exact same value as the result of the ToString() function I called in the app. Question is, how do I convert it to normal UTF-8 text to display?
Note: I have tried sending the string normally as a string content, but as far as I understood the default coding is ASCII so I got a lot of question marks.
Edit: Now I'm looking for some conversions solutions and trying them, but my question is also if there's a simpler way to do that (perhaps BinaryBody in the android, or different coding?)
Problem is in following lines:
byte[] messageBytes = message.getBytes("utf-8");
builder.addPart("message", new StringBody(messageBytes.toString()));
First you are transforming your UTF-16 string message into UTF-8 encoded messageBytes only to convert them back to UTF-16 string in next line. And there you are using StringBody constructor that will use ASCII encoding as default.
You should replace those lines with:
builder.addPart("message", new StringBody(message, Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
Related
Completely stuck on a problem related to the inbound parse webhook functionality offered by SendGrid: https://sendgrid.com/docs/for-developers/parsing-email/setting-up-the-inbound-parse-webhook/
First off everything is working just fine with retrieving the mail sent to my application endpoint. Using Request.Form I'm able to retrieve the data and work with it.
The problem is that we started noticing question mark symbols instead of letters when recieving some mails (written in swedish using Å Ä and Ö). This occured both when sending plaintext mails, and mails with an HTML-body.
However, this only happens every now and then. After a lot of searching I found out that if the mail is sent from e.g. Postbox or Outlook (or the like), and the application has the charset set to iso-8859-1 that's when Å Ä Ö is replaced by question marks.
To replicate the error and be able to debug it I set up a HTML page with a form using the iso-8859-1 encoding, sending a similar payload as the one seen in the link above (the default one). And after that been through testing a multitude of things trying to get it to work.
As of now I'm trying to recode the input, without success. Code I'm testing:
Encoding wind1252 = Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);
Encoding utf8 = Encoding.UTF8;
byte[] wind1252Bytes = wind1252.GetBytes(Request.Form.["html"]);
byte[] utf8Bytes = Encoding.Convert(wind1252, utf8,wind1252Bytes);
string utf8String = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(utf8Bytes);
This only results in the utf8String producing the same result with "???" where Å Ä Ö should be. My guess here is that perhaps it's due to the Request.Form["html"] returning a UTF-16 string, of the content that is encoded already in the wrong encoding iso-8859-1.
The method for fetching the POST is as follows
public async Task<InboundParseModel> FetchMail(IFormCollection form)
{
InboundParseModel _em = new InboundParseModel
{
To = form["to"].SingleOrDefault(),
From = form["from"].SingleOrDefault(),
Subject = form["subject"].SingleOrDefault(),
Html = form["html"].SingleOrDefault(),
Text = System.Net.WebUtility.HtmlEncode(form["text"].SingleOrDefault()),
Envelope = form["envelope"].SingleOrDefault()
};
}
Called from another method that the POST is done to by FetchMail(Request.Form);
Project info: ASP.NET Core 2.2, C#
So as stated earlier, I am completely stuck and don't really have any ideas on how to solve this. Any help would be much appreciated!
I'm trying to create a PHP client wrapper to talk to a .NET API. What I have is working but I am new to PHP development and what I have now looks like it may not work 100% of the time.
C# code I am trying to replicate:
private static void HMAC_Debug()
{
Console.WriteLine("Secret Key (Base64): 'qCJ6KNCd/ASFOt1cL5uq2TUYcRjplpYUy7QdUmvaCTs='");
var secret = Convert.FromBase64String("qCJ6KNCd/ASFOt1cL5uq2TUYcRjplpYUy7QdUmvaCTs=");
Console.WriteLine("Value To Hash (UTF8): 'MyHashingValue©'");
var value = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("MyHashingValue©");
using (HMACSHA256 hmac = new HMACSHA256(secret))
{
byte[] signatureBytes = hmac.ComputeHash(value);
string requestSignatureBase64String = Convert.ToBase64String(signatureBytes);
Console.WriteLine("Resulting Hash (Base64): '{0}'", requestSignatureBase64String);
}
Console.ReadLine();
}
My PHP Equiv:
$rawKey = base64_decode("qCJ6KNCd/ASFOt1cL5uq2TUYcRjplpYUy7QdUmvaCTs=");
// $hashValArr = unpack("C*", utf8_encode("MyHashingValue©"));
//
// $hashVal = call_user_func_array("pack", array_merge(array("C*"), $hashValArr));
$hashVal = "MyHashingValue©";
$raw = hash_hmac("sha256", $hashVal, $rawKey, TRUE);
$rawEnc = base64_encode($raw);
echo $rawEnc;
These two snippets produce the same Base64 output, but I am relying on the string variables in PHP being default encoded to UTF8 - is this a correct assumption or is there something more stable I can do?
You can see from the commented out PHP lines I attempted to manually encode it to UTF8 then extract out the ASCII bytes for the PHP HMAC function but it didn't produce the same output as the c# code.
Thanks
Marlon
Which version of PHP are you using?
In general you cannot rely on the encoding being UTF-8. In fact it might be possible that you just stored the file as UTF-8 (I guess without BOM) but older PHP versions (as far as I know before PHP 7) are not capable to work natively with unicode, they just read it as ASCII / Extended ASCII.
That said, if you do not manipulate the string it is possible that your example works because you are just processing the bytes that are stored in the variable. And if this byte sequence happend to be a UTF-8 encoded string at the time you inserted it into your source code it stays that way.
If you get the string from an abritrary source you should make sure which encoding is used and consider the multibyte string processing functions of PHP, which can work with different encodings [1].
[1] http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.mbstring.php
I'm struggling with the encoding of one of my string.
On a Mail Sending WS, I'm receiving a bad string containing "�" instead of "é" (that's what I'm seeing in the Debug Mode of Visual Studio at least).
The character comes from some JSON that is deserialized when entering the WS into my DTO.
Changing the Content-Type of the JSON is not solving the thing.
So I thought I'll change the encoding of my string by myself, because the JSON encoding thing seems like a VS deserialization issue (I started a thread here if one of you guys want to take a look at it).
I tried :
Encoding iso = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1");
Encoding defaultEncoding = Encoding.Default;
byte[] bytes = defaultEncoding.GetBytes(messedUpString);
byte[] isoBytes = Encoding.Convert(defaultEncoding, iso, bytes);
cleanString = iso.GetString(isoBytes);
Or :
byte[] bytes = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(messedUpString);
cleanString = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(bytes);
And it's not really effective... I get rid of the "�" char, which is the nice part, but I'm receiving in the cleanString "?" instead of the expected "é", and this in not really nice, or at least, the expected behavior.
In fact, every thing was fine in my application.
I used SOAPUI to test, and this was my error.
I downloaded some rest plugin for my browser, try from there, and everything worked.
Thanks for the help though #MattiVirkkunen
I'm struggling finding a feasible solution to this. I've tried looking around but can't find any documentation regarding this issue. If a customer sends out a message with quote(s), it break the payload syntax and android spits me back a 400 Bad Request error.
The only solution I can think of is by doing my own translations and validations. Allow only the basics, and for the restricted do my own "parsing" Ie take a quote, replace them with "/q" and then replace "/q" on the App when received. I don't like this solution because it involves logic on the App that if, I forget something. I want to be able to change it immediately rather then update everyones phone, app, etc.
I'm looking for an existing encoding I could apply that is processed correctly by the GCM servers. Allowing them to be accepted then broadcasted. Received by the phone with the characters intact.
Base64 encoding should get rid of the special characters. Just encode it before sending and decode it again on receiving:
Edit: sorry, just got a java/android sample here, I don't know how exactly xamarin works and what functions it provides:
// before sending
byte[] data = message.getBytes("UTF-8");
String base64Message = Base64.encodeToString(data, Base64.DEFAULT);
// on receiving
byte[] data = Base64.decode(base64Message , Base64.DEFAULT);
String message= new String(data, "UTF-8");
.Net translation of #tknell solution
Decode:
Byte[] data = System.Convert.FromBase64String(encodedString);
String decoded = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(data);
Encode:
Byte[] data = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(decodedString);
String encoded = System.Convert.ToBase64String(data);
I have an Android App which uses a C# web service.
Now i need to send some data from the app to the web service.
I want to do this with a Base64, but to let it work, i have to
use Base64.URL_SAFE|Base64.NO_WRAP, or else the web service won't be called.
So in my Android Code i do:
String dataToSend = "Some text"
byte[] data = dataToSend.getBytes();
Base64.encodeToString((data), Base64.URL_SAFE|Base64.NO_WRAP);
This works okay, but the problem is that i can't decode it in C#. In the web service
i do:
String data; // received data from Android
byte[] output = Convert.FromBase64String(data);
But if i run the code i get an error in C#:
System.FormatException{"The input is not a valid Base-64 string as it contains a non-base 64 character, more than two padding characters, or a non-white space character among the padding characters"}
I know it's because of the URL Safe and No Wrap, but i need it to send the data.
Is there a way to convert the data to a default Base64 String in C#? Or do i have replace/strip some things in the received Base64 String?