How to get UTF-8 working in Java webapps?

Question

I need to get UTF-8 working in my Java webapp (servlets + JSP, no framework used) to support äöå etc. for regular Finnish text and Cyrillic alphabets like ЦжФ for special cases.

My setup is the following:

• Development environment: Windows XP
• Production environment: Debian

Database used: MySQL 5.x

Users mainly use Firefox2 but also Opera 9.x, FF3, IE7 and Google Chrome are used to access the site.

How to achieve this?

Answer 1

I want also to add from here this part solved my utf problem:

runtime.encoding=<encoding>

Answer 2

For my case of displaying Unicode character from message bundles, I don't need to apply "JSP page encoding" section to display Unicode on my jsp page. All I need is "CharsetFilter" section.

Answer 3

To add to kosoant's answer, if you are using Spring, rather than writing your own Servlet filter, you can use the class org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter they provide, configuring it like the following in your web.xml:

 <filter>
    <filter-name>encoding-filter</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>
    <init-param>
       <param-name>forceEncoding</param-name>
       <param-value>FALSE</param-value>
    </init-param>
 </filter>
 <filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>encoding-filter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
 </filter-mapping>

Answer 4

I'm with a similar problem, but, in filenames of a file I'm compressing with apache commons. So, i resolved it with this command:

convmv --notest -f cp1252 -t utf8 * -r

it works very well for me. Hope it help anyone ;)

Answer 5

This is for Greek Encoding in MySql tables when we want to access them using Java:

Use the following connection setup in your JBoss connection pool (mysql-ds.xml)

<connection-url>jdbc:mysql://192.168.10.123:3308/mydatabase</connection-url>
<driver-class>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</driver-class>
<user-name>nts</user-name>
<password>xaxaxa!</password>
<connection-property name="useUnicode">true</connection-property>
<connection-property name="characterEncoding">greek</connection-property>

If you don't want to put this in a JNDI connection pool, you can configure it as a JDBC-url like the next line illustrates:

jdbc:mysql://192.168.10.123:3308/mydatabase?characterEncoding=greek

For me and Nick, so we never forget it and waste time anymore.....

Answer 6

One other point that hasn't been mentioned relates to Java Servlets working with Ajax. I have situations where a web page is picking up utf-8 text from the user sending this to a JavaScript file which includes it in a URI sent to the Servlet. The Servlet queries a database, captures the result and returns it as XML to the JavaScript file which formats it and inserts the formatted response into the original web page.

In one web app I was following an early Ajax book's instructions for wrapping up the JavaScript in constructing the URI. The example in the book used the escape() method, which I discovered (the hard way) is wrong. For utf-8 you must use encodeURIComponent().

Few people seem to roll their own Ajax these days, but I thought I might as well add this.