Jackson->Jackson + HttpPost = "Invalid UTF-8 middle byte", Setting Mime and Encoding

It looks like the problem is how the ContentType parameter for the HttpClient's StringEntity constructor is being created.

Using the ContentType.APPLICATION_JSON constant as a parameter (which corresponds to the "application/json; charset=utf-8" mime type) makes everything work.

Here is an example posting the JSON string to a public http service that echoes the request back to the client:

public class HttpClientEncoding {

    static String TINY_UTF8_DOC = "[{ \"id\" : \"2\", \"fields\" : { \"subject\" : " +
            "[{ \"name\" : \"subject\", \"value\" : \"Stra\u00DFe\" }] } }]";

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpPost post = new HttpPost("http://httpbin.org/post");
        StringEntity entity = new StringEntity(TINY_UTF8_DOC, ContentType.APPLICATION_JSON);
        //StringEntity entity = new StringEntity(TINY_UTF8_DOC, ContentType.create("application/json; charset=utf-8"));
        post.setEntity(entity);
        HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(post);
        String result = EntityUtils.toString(response.getEntity());
        System.out.println(result);
        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
        JsonNode node = mapper.readValue(result, JsonNode.class);
        System.out.println(node.get("json").get(0).get("fields").get("subject").get(0).get("value").asText());
    }
}

Output:

{
  "origin": "46.9.77.167",
  "url": "http://httpbin.org/post",
  "args": {},
  "data": "[{ \"id\" : \"2\", \"fields\" : { \"subject\" : [{ \"name\" : \"subject\", \"value\" : \"Stra\u00dfe\" }] } }]",
  "files": {},
  "form": {},
  "headers": {
    "Content-Length": "90",
    "User-Agent": "Apache-HttpClient/4.3.3 (java 1.5)",
    "Host": "httpbin.org",
    "Connection": "close",
    "X-Request-Id": "c02864cc-a1d6-434c-9cff-1f6187ceb080",
    "Content-Type": "application/json; charset=UTF-8"
  },
  "json": [
    {
      "id": "2",
      "fields": {
        "subject": [
          {
            "value": "Stra\u00dfe",
            "name": "subject"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}
Straße