Unicode text through socket in java

I am facing a tiny issue (I believe) in socket programming. When sending text from non-English languages, I get garbled results. After a lot of researching on google, I made some corrections. I changed getBytes() to getBytes("UTF-8") and tried to send some Arabic text.

When connecting sockets locally, it works fine. I see the arabic text I expected. But when testing from online, the results display strange/garbled characters.

Here is the text I tried:

“مرحبا” (this is the arab text of “hello”) which displayed to me as “مرحبا”

Please help me in resolving this issue.

Answer

This is some Java code I had lying around that’s used for setting the stream encodings on a pair of byte streams, but you could do the same with a singleton, at least assuming you’re using TCP stream sockets not UDP datagrams.

    Process
    slave_process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmdname -opts cmdargs");

 OutputStream
 __bytes_into_his_stdin  = slave_process.getOutputStream();

 OutputStreamWriter
   chars_into_his_stdin  = new OutputStreamWriter(
                             __bytes_into_his_stdin,
         /* DO NOT OMIT! */  Charset.forName("UTF-8").newEncoder()
                         );

 InputStream
 __bytes_from_his_stdout = slave_process.getInputStream();

 InputStreamReader
   chars_from_his_stdout = new InputStreamReader(
                             __bytes_from_his_stdout,
         /* DO NOT OMIT! */  Charset.forName("UTF-8").newDecoder()
                         );

 InputStream
 __bytes_from_his_stderr = slave_process.getErrorStream();

 InputStreamReader
   chars_from_his_stderr = new InputStreamReader(
                             __bytes_from_his_stderr,
         /* DO NOT OMIT! */  Charset.forName("UTF-8").newDecoder()
                         );