JSON Invalid UTF-8 middle byte

Solution 1:

JSON data must be encoded as UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-32. The JSON decoder can determine the encoding by examining the first four octets of the byte stream:

       00 00 00 xx  UTF-32BE
       00 xx 00 xx  UTF-16BE
       xx 00 00 00  UTF-32LE
       xx 00 xx 00  UTF-16LE
       xx xx xx xx  UTF-8

It sounds like the server is encoding data in some illegal encoding (ISO-8859-1, windows-1252, etc.)

Solution 2:

I got this exception when in the Java Client Application I was serializing a JSON like this

String json = mapper.writeValueAsString(contentBean);

and on the Server Side I was using Spring Boot as REST Endpoint. Exception was:

nested exception is com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonMappingException: Invalid UTF-8 start byte 0xaa

My problem was, that I was not setting the correct encoding on the HTTP Client. This solved my problem:

updateRequest.setHeader("Content-Type", "application/json;charset=UTF-8");
StringEntity entity= new StringEntity(json, "UTF-8");
updateRequest.setEntity(entity);

Android set content type HttpPost

Solution 3:

I got this after saving the JSON file using Notepad2, so I had to open it with Notepad++ and then say "Convert to UTF-8". Then it worked.

Solution 4:

On the off chance it may help others I'll share a related anecdote.

I encountered this exact error (Invalid UTF-8 middle byte 0x3f) running a PowerShell script via the PowerShell Integrated Script Environment (ISE). The identical script, executed outside the ISE, works fine. The code uses the Confluence v3 and v5.x REST APIs and this error is logged on the Confluence v5.x server - presumably because the ISE somehow mucks with the request.

Solution 5:

This awnser solved my problem. Below is a copy of it:

Make sure to start you JVM with -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8. You JVM defaults to the operating system charset

This is a JVM argument which could be added, for example, either to JBoss standalone or JBoss running from Eclipse.

In my case, this problem happened isolatelly on only one of my team people's computer. All the others was working without this problem.