Encoding problems in JSP

Question

I have an html-form with several text fields.

When I try to submit not English characters (Russian in my case) server is received "unreadable" string (not questions - "???" but some strange characters).

I simplified my code to show it here:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>
<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" language="java" %>
<html>
  <head><title>Simple jsp page</title></head>
  <body>
    <c:out value="${param.rustext}"/>
    <form action="/test" method="post">
        <input type="text" name="rustext" width="30">
        <input type="submit" value="Submit">
    </form>
  </body>
</html>

How should I fix that?

Are your page headers actually sending UTF-8 as the encoding? Check with something like Fiddler — Chris Ballance, May 31 '09 at 18:05

erickson · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-08T15:37:14.690

8

Tomcat uses ISO-8859-1 as the default character encoding for URL parameters, regardless of the encoding of the page that contains the URL. This can be changed with the "URIEncoding" attribute in its Connector configuration. Other application servers may have similar settings.

This article covers many problems commonly encountered when working with JSP.

edited Oct 08 '15 at 15:37

answered May 31 '09 at 18:38

erickson

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Yes, I use Tomcat. Thanks for the link, I'll try to find something usefull there. – Roman May 31 '09 at 18:41
See http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/config/http.html for the specifics of the URIEncoding attribute. – erickson May 31 '09 at 19:19
1

This answer is *actually* wrong. The OP was using POST, not GET. – BalusC Sep 29 '10 at 11:30

Victor Ionescu · Answer 2 · 2010-09-29T11:52:09.190

Erickson explained this very well on this page. A server-independent solution is to use a character encoding filter, à la org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter. See example below:

import java.io.IOException;
import javax.servlet.Filter;
import javax.servlet.FilterChain;
import javax.servlet.FilterConfig;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.ServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.ServletResponse;

public class EncodingFilter implements Filter {
    private String encoding = "utf-8";
    public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response,
            FilterChain filterChain) throws IOException, ServletException {
        request.setCharacterEncoding(encoding);
        filterChain.doFilter(request, response);
    }
    public void init(FilterConfig filterConfig) throws ServletException {
        String encodingParam = filterConfig.getInitParameter("encoding");
        if (encodingParam != null) {
            encoding = encodingParam;
        }
    }
    public void destroy() {
        // nothing todo
    }
}

In web.xml add the filter declaration and the filter url mapping in the appropriate sections:

  <filter>
  <filter-name>EncodingFilter</filter-name>
  <description>
    <![CDATA[Changes the encoding of the request, in order to help the appserver to correctly interpret request params]]>
  </description>
  <filter-class>com.mypackage.EncodingFilter</filter-class>  
 <init-param>
    <param-name>encoding</param-name>
    <param-value>ISO-8859-15</param-value>
  </init-param>   
</filter>


  <filter-mapping>
      <filter-name>EncodingFilter</filter-name>
      <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
  </filter-mapping>

Note that this only covers the request body, not the request URL. In other words: this will set encoding for POST requests, not for GET requests. For GET requests you still need to fiddle with the servletcontainer's config, as outlined in Erickson's answer. — BalusC, Sep 29 '10 at 11:28

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 08 '15 at 13:14

This is the same as Victor Ionescu proposed, but you don't need to write your own encoding filter.

Add the following filter to web.xml

<filter>
    <filter-name>charsetFilter</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>charsetFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>*.admin</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered May 31 '09 at 19:12

0

When using POST - which is a must tu use encoding - the form is send as content-type "application/x-www-form-urlencoded". You may specify the form-attribute accept-charset="UTF-8" to specify your encoding.

answered May 31 '09 at 19:12

Arne Burmeister

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Encoding problems in JSP

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