UTF-8 encoding on J2EE

A 3 step method to apply UTF-8 encoding to J2EE applications.

1. Add the following directives to the page included in ALL jsps.

<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"%>
<%@ page pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>

This will add request headers and meta-tags to every page served which will tell the browser that the page is utf-8 encoded.

2. Add a filter at server side to encode the request body received to UTF-8. A spring UTF-8 encoder (available in org.springframework.web*.jar of spring 3 distribution) if used, will have the following changes in web.xml:

<filter>
	<filter-name>encodingFilter</filter-name>
	<filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
	<init-param>
		<param-name>encoding</param-name>
		<param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
	</init-param>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
			<filter-name>encodingFilter</filter-name>
			<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

3. Tell the container that the URLs too are to be encoded in UTF-8. In tomcat, this is done by adding the attribute URIEncoding=UTF-8 to the connector tag in server.xml. Else, this can also be done by setting useBodyEncodingForURI=true in the connector tag. This will tell the connector to use the same encoding used for the request body (set to UTF-8 in the previous steps.) This will make sure that the parameters received via GET requests too are properly understood by the application.

Kj

Kj [/.] Sreekumar programs computers as a hobby and profession. Into programming from his school days, Sree uses Codemarvels to key in facts and fixes he finds interesting while working on different projects. Some of the articles here give away a few shades of his philosophical leanings too.

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