I've visited each one of the questions about UTF-8 encoding in HTML and nothing seems to be making it work like expected.
I added the meta
tag : nothing changed.
I added the accept-charset
attribute in form
: nothing changed.
JSP File
<%@ page pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">
<title>Editer les sous-titres</title>
</head>
<body>
<form method="post" action="/Subtitlor/edit" accept-charset="UTF-8">
<h3 name="nameOfFile"><c:out value="${ nameOfFile }"/></h3>
<input type="hidden" name="nameOfFile" id="nameOfFile" value="${ nameOfFile }"/>
<c:if test="${ !saved }">
<input value ="Enregistrer le travail" type="submit" style="position:fixed; top: 10px; right: 10px;" />
</c:if>
<a href="/Subtitlor/" style="position:fixed; top: 50px; right: 10px;">Retour à la page d'accueil</a>
<c:if test="${ saved }">
<div style="position:fixed; top: 90px; right: 10px;">
<c:out value="Travail enregistré dans la base de donnée"/>
</div>
</c:if>
<table border="1">
<c:if test="${ !saved }">
<thead>
<th style="weight:bold">Original Line</th>
<th style="weight:bold">Translation</th>
<th style="weight:bold">Already translated</th>
</thead>
</c:if>
<c:forEach items="${ subtitles }" var="line" varStatus="status">
<tr>
<td style="text-align:right;"><c:out value="${ line }" /></td>
<td><input type="text" name="line${ status.index }" id="line${ status.index }" size="35" /></td>
<td style="text-align:right"><c:out value="${ lines[status.index].content }"/></td>
</tr>
</c:forEach>
</table>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Servlet
for (int i = 0 ; i < 2; i++){
System.out.println(request.getParameter("line"+i));
}
Output
Et ton père et sa soeur
Il ne sera jamais parti.
Based on your posted output it seems that the parameter is sent as UTF8 and later the unicode bytes of the string are interpreted as ISO-8859-1.
Following snippet demonstrates your observed behavior
output
For me the form send the correct UTF8 encoded data, but later this data is not treated as UTF8.
edit Some other points to try:
output the character encoding your request has
force the usage of UTF-8 to retrieve the parameter (untested, only an idea)
Warm up
Let me start by saying the universal fact which we all know that computer doesn't understand anything but bits - 0's and 1's.
Now, when you are submitting a HTML form over HTTP and values travel over the wire to reach destination server then essentially a whole lot of bits - 0's and 1's are being passed over.
An analogy for this can be - I am sending a letter to you and telling you whether it is written in English or French or Dutch, so that you will get exact message as I intended to send you. And while replying to me you will also mention in which language I should read.
Important take away is that the fact that when data is leaving the client it will be encoded and same will be decoded at server side, and vice-versa. If you do not specify anything then content will be encoded as per application/x-www-form-urlencoded before leaving from client side to server side.
Core concept
Reading warm up is important. There are couple of things you need to make sure to get the expected results.
Having correct encoding set before sending data from client to server
To ensure this, there are several ways talked about but I will say use HTTP Accept-Charset request-header field. As per your provided code snippet you are already using and using it correctly so you are good from that front.
There are people who will say that do not use this or it is not implemented but I would very humbly disagree with them.
Accept-Charset
is part of HTTP 1.1 specification (I have provided link) and browser implementing HTTP 1.1 will implement the same. They may also argue that use Accept request-header field's "charset" attribute butI am providing you all data and facts, not just words, but still if you are not satisfied then do following tests using different browsers.
accept-charset="ISO-8859-1"
in your HTML form and POST/GET form having Chinese or advanced French characters to server.You will see that none of times you were able to see the expected characters at server. But if you will use same encoding scheme then you will see expected character. So, browsers do implements
accept-charset
and its effect kicks-in.Having correct decoding and encoding set at server side to read request and write response back to client
There are hell lot of ways talked about that you can do to achieve this (sometime some configuration may be required based on specific scenario but below solves 95% cases and holds good for your case as well). For example:
setCharacterEncoding
on request and response-Dfile.encoding=utf8
etc. Read more hereMy favorite is first one and will solve your problem as well - "Character Encoding Filter", because of below reasons:
1. Character encoding filter
You can do following to implement your own character encoding filter. If you are using some framework like Springs etc. then you need not to write you own class but just do the configuration in web.xml
Core logic in below is very similar to what Spring does, apart from a lot of dependency, bean aware thing they do.
web.xml (configuration)
EncodingFilter (character encoding implementation class)
2. ServletRequest.setCharacterEncoding()
This is essentially same code done in character encoding filter but instead of doing in filter, you are doing it in your servlet or controller class.
Idea is again to use
request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
to set the encoding of http request stream before you start reading the http request stream.Try below code, and you will see that if you are not using some sort of filter to set the encoding on request object then first log will be NULL while second log will be "UTF-8".
Below is important excerpt from setCharacterEncoding Java docs. Another thing to note is you should provide a valid encoding scheme else you will get
UnsupportedEncodingException
Wherever needed I have tried best to provide you official links or StackOverflow accepted bounty answers, so that you can build trust.
You can use Strings related to ISO in your charset and pageEncoding definations in your JSP code.
Like charset="ISO-8859-1" and pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1".
There is a bug in tomcat that may trapped you. The first-filter defines the encoding the request is based on.
Every other filter or servlet behind the first-filter can not change the encoding of the request anymore.
I do not think this bug will be fixed in the future because the current applications may rely on the encoding.
It indeed doesn't have any effect when the page is served over HTTP instead of e.g. from local disk file system (i.e. the page's URL is
http://...
instead of e.g.file://...
). In HTTP, the charset in HTTP response header will be used. You've already set it as below:This will not only write out the HTTP response using UTF-8, but also set the
charset
attribute in theContent-Type
response header.This one will be used by the webbrowser to interpret the response and encode any HTML form params.
It has only effect in Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. Even then it is doing it wrongly. Never use it. All real webbrowsers will instead use the
charset
attribute specified in theContent-Type
header of the response. Even MSIE will do it the right way as long as you do not specify theaccept-charset
attribute. As said before, you have already properly set it viapageEncoding
.Get rid of both the
meta
tag andaccept-charset
attribute. They do not have any useful effect and they will only confuse yourself in long term and even make things worse when enduser uses MSIE. Just stick topageEncoding
. Instead of repeating thepageEncoding
over all JSP pages, you could also set it globally inweb.xml
as below:As said, this will tell the JSP engine to write HTTP response output using UTF-8 and set it in the HTTP response header too. The webbrowser will use the same charset to encode the HTTP request parameters before sending back to server.
Your only missing step is to tell the server that it must use UTF-8 to decode the HTTP request parameters before returning in
getParameterXxx()
calls. How to do that globally depends on the HTTP request method. Given that you're using POST method, this is relatively easy to achieve with the below servlet filter class which automatically hooks on all requests:That's all. In Servlet 3.0+ (Tomcat 7 and newer) you don't need additional
web.xml
configuration.You only need to keep in mind that it's very important that
setCharacterEncoding()
method is called before the POST request parameters are obtained for the first time using any ofgetParameterXxx()
methods. This is because they are parsed only once on first access and then cached in server memory.So e.g. below sequence is wrong:
Doing the
setCharacterEncoding()
job in a servlet filter will guarantee that it runs timely (at least, before any servlet).In case you'd like to instruct the server to decode GET (not POST) request parameters using UTF-8 too (those parameters you see after
?
character in URL, you know), then you'd basically need to configure it in the server end. It's not possible to configure it via servlet API. In case you're using for example Tomcat as server, then it's a matter of addingURIEncoding="UTF-8"
attribute in<Connector>
element of Tomcat's own/conf/server.xml
.In case you're still seeing Mojibake in the console output of
System.out.println()
calls, then chances are big that the stdout itself is not configured to use UTF-8. How to do that depends on who's responsible for interpreting and presenting the stdout. In case you're using for example Eclipse as IDE, then it's a matter of setting Window > Preferences > General > Workspace > Text File Encoding to UTF-8.See also: