[AXISCPP-964] SOAP request/response not UTF-8 encoded (but claims to be)

• Type: Bug
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: current (nightly)
• Component/s: SOAP
• Environment: All platforms, except OS/400
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Henrik Nordberg
• Created: 22/Apr/06 02:07
• Updated: 14/Feb/09 00:32

Description

(See the end of this description for a one-liner that works around this problem for most cases.)

SoapSerializer.cpp, line 379 says

serialize( "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' ?>", NULL);

that is that the SOAP response is UTF-8 encoded. But this is only true for OS/400 as can be seen in HTTPTransport.cpp, lines 311-

#ifndef _OS400_
*m_pActiveChannel << this->getHTTPHeaders ();
*m_pActiveChannel << this->m_strBytesToSend.c_str ();
#else
// Ebcdic (OS/400) systems need to convert the data to UTF-8. Note that free() is
// correctly used and should not be changed to delete().
const char *buf = this->getHTTPHeaders ();
utf8Buf = toUTF8((char *)buf, strlen(buf)+1);
*m_pActiveChannel << utf8Buf;
free(utf8Buf);
utf8Buf = NULL;
utf8Buf = toUTF8((char *)this->m_strBytesToSend.c_str(), this->m_strBytesToSend.length()+1);
*m_pActiveChannel << utf8Buf;
free(utf8Buf);
utf8Buf = NULL;
#endif

This leads to clients trying to decode the response as UTF-8, and will have errors whenever the response contains non-ASCII characters (i.e., > 127).
Axis Java, for example, will prduce this error upon decoding:
"java.io.UTFDataFormatException: Invalid byte 2 of 3-byte UTF-8 sequence."

A simple workaround is to change SoapSerializer.cpp, line 379:
from
serialize( "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' ?>", NULL);
to
serialize( "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='ISO-8859-1' ?>", NULL);

The real fix, however, is to encode the response with UTF-8 for all platforms (not just OS/400).

Issue Links

• is depended upon by: AXISCPP-741 Extended ascii characters not deserialized?