Can signed bytes be read from a stream?

I'm trying to read bytes sent by a java servlet into a C# application, so far, I haven't been able to get anything more than gibberish from the servlet using normal streams in C#. I've tried various forms of decoding, but haven't found a working way to read sbytes into a c# application from an http source.

The servlet bytes are sent with

Edited Code

public void doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException{
    ServletOutputStream resp = response.getOutputStream();
    try{
        resp.write("test".getBytes("UTF-8"));
    }
    catch(Exception e){
        //Do Nothing
    }

C# reads in with

        try
        {
            HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://path.to/servlet");
            req.Method = "POST";
            req.ContentType = "text/html";
            HttpWebResponse resp = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();

            string text;
            using (var reader = new StreamReader(resp.GetResponseStream()))
            {
                text = reader.ReadToEnd();
                Console.WriteLine(text);
            }
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(e.ToString());
        }

I end up with two question marks or the same two ascii symbols.

Does anyone have any idea how to do stream these Java bytes into a C# application?

Jon Skeet
people
quotationmark

Two problems:

  • You're using the platform-default encoding in both C# and Java. That's almost always a bad choice. Specify the encoding explicitly in Java - UTF-8 is usually a good choice. (That's also the default for most .NET code.)

  • You're ignoring the return value of Stream.Read; in general you should use that to work out how much data you've actually received. In this case, however, it would be a much better idea to use StreamReader:

    string text;
// Uses UTF-8 implicitly
using (var reader = new StreamReader(httpResponse.GetResponseStream())
{
    text = reader.ReadToEnd();
}

The signedness of bytes in Java is irrelevant here.

(Additionally, why are you using new String("test")? What do you think that will do over just using "test"?)

people

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