Android WebView with garbled UTF-8 characters.

I'm using some webviews in my android app, but are unable to make them display in utf-8 encoding.

If use this one I won't see my scandinavian charcters:

mWebView.loadUrl("file:///android_asset/om.html")

And if try this one, I won't get anything displayed at all

mWebView.loadDataWithBaseURL("file:///android_asset/om.html", null, "text/html", "utf-8",null);

Regards

You can try to edit the settings of your webview before you load the data:

WebSettings settings = mWebView.getSettings();
settings.setDefaultTextEncodingName("utf-8");

Also, as provided in the comment below, be sure to add "charset=utf-8" to the loadData call:

mWebView.loadData(getString(R.string.info_texto), "text/html; charset=utf-8", "utf-8");

This seems to have been broken in some form or fashion forever. Issue 1733

Use loadDataWithBaseURL instead of loadData.

// Pretend this is an html document with those three characters
String scandinavianCharacters = "øæå";

// Won't render correctly
webView.loadData(scandinavianCharacters, "text/html", "UTF-8");

// Will render correctly
webView.loadDataWithBaseURL(null, scandinavianCharacters, "text/html", "UTF-8", null);

Now the part that is truly annoying is that on the Samsung Galaxy S II (4.0.3) loadData() works just fine, but testing on the Galaxy Nexus (4.0.2) the multi-byte characters are garbled unless you use loadDataWithBaseURL(). WebView Documentation

Recent versions of Android

Some are reporting a change in the behavior of the loadData calls requiring the mimeType to include charset=utf-8.

webView.loadData(scandinavianCharacters, "text/html; charset=utf-8", "UTF-8");

You can also use this formulation with WebSettings

WebView webView = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.DemoWebView);
WebSettings webSettings = webView.getSettings();
webSettings.setDefaultTextEncodingName("utf-8");  
webView.loadData(scandinavianCharacters, "text/html; charset=utf-8", null);

It is amazing that Android still hasn't resolved this basic issue.

Derzu's bit is very helpful above:

webview.loadData(getString(R.string.info_texto), "text/html; charset=utf-8", "utf-8");

I had UTF-8 on Android 2.x and garbled ANSI on 4.x until I put in the

 charset=utf-8

in the wv.loadUrlWhatever() call. Excellent attention to detail, Derzu