[IVY-1060] ApacheURLLister.retrieveListing() fails if the encoding of the URL list is different from the default encoding

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.0, 2.1.0, 2.3.0-RC1
• Fix Version/s: 2.3.0-RC2, 2.4.0-RC1
• Component/s: Core
• Labels: patch

Environment

OS: z/OS 1.9

java version "1.6.0"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build pmz3160sr3-20081108_01(SR3))

• Assignee: Nicolas Lalevée
• Reporter: Robin Fernandes
• Created: 08/Apr/09 18:15
• Updated: 26/Mar/14 21:53
• Resolved: 15/Aug/12 15:41

Description

ApacheURLLister.retrieveListing() assumes that the list of URLs is encoded in the same encoding as the system's default encoding.

The problematic code is:

BufferedReader r = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(URLHandlerRegistry.getDefault().openStream(url)));
String htmlText = FileUtil.readEntirely(r);

FileUtil.readEntirely() converts the the content of the BufferedReader r to a String. Because no encoding is specified in the InputStreamReader constructor, the default encoding is used. If the default encoding does not match the actual encoding of the data read from url, htmlText ends up as a garbage String and the URL pattern matcher fails.

This causes an issue on z/OS, where the default encoding is EBCDIC (e.g. IBM-1047) but the data containing the list of URLs is typically retrieved from the network as ASCII (ISO-8559-1).

A workaround could be to specify the system property -Dfile.encoding=ISO-8559-1 on the command line, but this is a bit of a big hammer. In particular, it is not suitable when Ivy is used within an application where we don't to assume all input is ISO-8559-1.