It all depends on how the XML is encoded on the other end. Reading the API for InputStreamReader shows that there are several encoding names available to help specify the encoding type.


  • 8859_1 (ISO-8859-1/Latin-1)
  • 8859_2 (ISO-8859-2/Latin-2)
  • 8859_3 (ISO-8859-3/Latin-3)
  • 8859_4 (ISO-8859-4/Latin-4)
  • 8859_5 (ISO-8859-5/Latin-5)
  • 8859_6 (ISO-8859-6/Latin-6)
  • 8859_7 (ISO-8859-7/Latin-7)
  • 8859_8 (ISO-8859-8/Latin-8)
  • 8859_9 (ISO-8859-9/Latin-9)
  • ASCII (7-bit ASCII)
  • UTF8 (UCS Transformation Format-8)

Personally, I used for a project the following:
InputStream io = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(l_file));
InputStreamReader ir = new InputStreamReader(io,format);

Where the "format" variable was a String that was either "8859_1" or "UTF8", depending on how the file sent was encoded.