DownloadResults with ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE

[stravag]

Hi

We've been using the Android sample code to communicate with ABBY OCR. But we noticed that in the plain/text result of the downloadResults request at the beginning of the text there's always a ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE (U+FEFF) character that we had to remove.

Why is that character in the response?

Our current "solution" is to remove the character in the ResultsActivity

contents.toString().replaceFirst("\uFEFF", "")

[Dmitry-Me]

I assume that you're describing the following scenario:

• your application invokes getTaskStatus and obtains an XML describing a completed task
• that XML contains a URL of a result file
• you download said result file from the URL and it's a Unicode text file starting with 0xFEFF

In this case the FEFF is a byte order mark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark) indicating that it's UTF-16 big endian.

[stravag]

Yes thanks for the reply, that's exactly it! After further research I found that there is an old known bug in Java, it can't deal with BOMs automatically, making it necessary to remove it manually. http://bugs.java.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=4508058

It would be good if you could change the sample code to incorporate that. https://github.com/abbyysdk/ocrsdk.com/blob/master/Android/src/abbyy/ocrsdk/android/ResultsActivity.java

Apache Commons IO for instance provides a BOMInputStream

[Dmitry-Me]

Which exportFormat do you use when you invoke /processImage?

[stravag]

TXT Format: language=English&exportFormat=txt

[Dmitry-Me]

Where's the downloadResults method in the sample code?

[stravag]

https://github.com/abbyysdk/ocrsdk.com/blob/master/Android/src/com/abbyy/ocrsdk/Client.java#L153

[Dmitry-Me]

It's donloadResult (no s), that's why I asked. This method is for any type of results, including PDF, RTF and whatever else. Also even if it's a text result there's no guarantee that it will then be read and processed with Java code. So I'm not sure it's a good idea to do anything with the output file in the generic Android sample.