Hi,
while the new HTTP client provides means to read text files as a single
string or as a stream of lines, it actually does not provide any way to
read the text via the Reader class. For many text types, the character
encoding is not fixed by the format but may vary. Thus one cannot easily
wrap the input stream of HttpResponse.BodyHandlers.ofInputStream into a
Reader.
Usually, the character encoding is contained in the content-type header
field, but it is not easily extractable if done correctly with
whitespace and quote handling. I have seen in the source code, that the
implementation does have a method to retrieve the encoding, but this is
unfortunately deeply buried and not exposed in the user API.
So I would like to suggest to add a HttpResponse.BodyHandler.ofReader
method to the API, which takes any charset parameter in the content-type
header into account, like the ofString and ofLines methods.
Alternatively, convenience methods in HttpHeaders to read the character
set (and perhaps the MIME type as well) or a helper class in java.net
could be provided. I know that there are quite a few third party
implementations, even in the now detached J2EE framework (activation and
mail), but I am regarding this as essential enough to be included in the
base Java API or at least in the java.net.http module.
Thanks for your attention,
regards,
Klaus
