unrecognised character when displaying delimited text on servlet - google-app-engine

Question

I'm working on a servlet that accepts zipfile and will unzip and display the content of the csv files.
So far i'm able to display a few records. However, as shown in the image below, one of the record is diplaying "question marks"/unrecognised characters.
I checked the csv file and it's perfectly fine. I also tried to delete the text and typed some other text, but still unsuccessful.
image of the problem:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/11910420/Screen%20Shot%202012-09-07%20at%203.18.46%20PM.png
public class AdminBootStrap extends HttpServlet {
public void doPost(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp)
throws IOException {
resp.setContentType("text/plain");
PrintWriter out = resp.getWriter();
try {
ServletFileUpload upload = new ServletFileUpload();
FileItemIterator iterator = upload.getItemIterator(req);
while (iterator.hasNext()) {
FileItemStream item = iterator.next();
InputStream in = item.openStream();
if (item.isFormField()) {
out.println("Got a form field: "
+ item.getFieldName());
} else {
out.println("Got an uploaded file: "
+ item.getFieldName() + ", name = "
+ item.getName());
ZipInputStream zis = new ZipInputStream(
new BufferedInputStream(in));
ZipEntry entry;
// Read each entry from the ZipInputStream until no
// more entry found indicated by a null return value
// of the getNextEntry() method.
//
byte[] buf = new byte[5000];
int len;
String s = null;
while ((entry = zis.getNextEntry()) != null) {
out.println("Unzipping: " + entry.getName());
if (entry.getName().equalsIgnoreCase("booking.csv")) {
while ((len = zis.read(buf)) > 0) {
s = new String(buf);
String[] arrStr = s.split("\\n");
for (String a : arrStr) {
out.println(a);
}// end for
}
}
any ideas?

Answer 1

The culprit is s = new String(buf) because it decodes a string of bytes into a string of characters via a default encoding. Unfortunately the default encoding on GAE is US-ASCII.
You should the encoding of your CSV. For example for UTF-8 use:
s = new String(buf, "UTF-8");