Mark Needham

In my continued attempts to learn how to write an Android application I came across a problem with character encoding when trying to load some text into a WebView.

I was initially trying to write the text to the WebView like this:

WebView webview = new WebView(collection.getContext());
webview.loadData(textWithQuotesIn, "text/html", "UTF-8");

But ended up with the output in the picture on the left hand side. I tried playing around with the encoding and debugged the application all the way through until it hit the WebView but there didn’t seem to be any problem with the text.

I eventually came across a post on StackOverflow where mice suggested using one of the other methods available for writing to a WebView.

I changed my code to read like this:

WebView webview = new WebView(collection.getContext());
webview.loadDataWithBaseURL(url, textWithQuotesIn, "text/html", "UTF-8", url);

And now the single quotes are rendering correctly as can be seen on the image on the right.

I had a quick look at the Android source code to see if there was any obvious reason why one of the methods would work and the other wouldn’t but I couldn’t see anything.

Perhaps I’m doing something wrong with my call to ‘loadData’ and that’s why it’s not rendering the character set correctly. If that’s the case please let me know.