Kafka producer sending invalid characters

Question

Using following code, I send Elasticsearch documents for indexing. I tried converting basic Objects to JSON and sent via producer. However, every message (as checked from the console) appends jibberish characters like - ��t�{"productId":2455

public boolean sendMessage()
{
    PageRequest page = new PageRequest(0, 1); 
    Product p = product.findByName("Cream", page).getContent().get(0);
    String json = "";
    ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
    try {
        json = mapper.writeValueAsString(p);
    } catch (JsonProcessingException e1) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e1.printStackTrace();
    }       
    logger.info("JSON = " + json);

    boolean status =  inputToKafka.send(org.springframework.integration.support.MessageBuilder.withPayload(json).build());
    try {
        Thread.sleep(10000);
    } catch (InterruptedException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return status;
}

Outbound configuration

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xmlns:int="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration"
       xmlns:int-kafka="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/kafka"
       xmlns:task="http://www.springframework.org/schema/task"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/kafka http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/kafka/spring-integration-kafka.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/spring-integration.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/task http://www.springframework.org/schema/task/spring-task.xsd">

    <int:channel id="inputToKafka">
        <int:queue/>
    </int:channel>

    <int-kafka:outbound-channel-adapter
            id="kafkaOutboundChannelAdapter"
            kafka-producer-context-ref="kafkaProducerContext"
            channel="inputToKafka">
        <int:poller fixed-delay="1000" time-unit="MILLISECONDS" receive-timeout="0" task-executor="taskExecutor"/>
    </int-kafka:outbound-channel-adapter>

    <task:executor id="taskExecutor" pool-size="5" keep-alive="120" queue-capacity="500"/>

    <int-kafka:producer-context id="kafkaProducerContext">
        <int-kafka:producer-configurations>
            <int-kafka:producer-configuration broker-list="localhost:9092"
                                              topic="test_topic"
                                              compression-codec="default"/>
        </int-kafka:producer-configurations>
    </int-kafka:producer-context>

    </beans>

Any clue ?

Plugin used: Spring Extension Kafka

Solution

Those could be tab characters (because of indented JSON) that your console doesn't interpret well.

If you disable the indentation of the output generated by the object mapper, those characters might go away.

try {
    mapper.disable(SerializationFeature.INDENT_OUTPUT);     <---- add this line
    json = mapper.writeValueAsString(p);
} catch (JsonProcessingException e1) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e1.printStackTrace();
}