I'm using Sping MVC with freemarker views. I set up a FreeMarkerViewResolver to resolve the views and it works so far but now I have encoding problems. All my views are HTML 5 pages in UTF-8 encoding and I also added a <meta charset="UTF-8" />
to the HTML page but characters are still printed in the wrong encoding. I checked the HTTP headers with curl and found this:
k@jules:~$ curl -I http://localhost:8080/testweb/test.view
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: */*;charset=ISO-8859-1
But when I request some non-existing resource (Which generates a Tomcat error) then I get this:
k@jules:~$ curl -I http://localhost:8080/testweb/nothere.html
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
So Tomcat itself returns the correct content-type but a Spring MVC Freemarker views don't.
For a JSP I can set the Content-Type in the JSP header but where can I set it for a freemarker template? I guess I have to do this somewhere in the Spring bean configuration but I can't find the right place.
The view resolver (should be in your
dispatcher-servlet.xml
) has acontentType
property for that:I have also experienced a problem with showing UTF-8 characters (special characters like æ. ø and å etc.), when using spring framework and freemarker template.
What i did was.
1. Ensure that your .ftl page is encoded with utf-8 This is an important thing to ensure, that a page not encoded with UTF-8 charset, could show the wrong numbers even though you have all the other requirements set. Check your IDE settings, to find out which default encoding it sets your files to. I think however today that both Eclipse and NetBeans set all files with UTF-8 encoding as standard. You must ensure that it is encoding UTF-8 with no BOM.
2. Include the Meta tag in your template file to set the charset In your template (.ftl) file, which holds your
<head>
tag, set a<meta>
, with the attributecharset="UTF-8"
. This is if you use HTML 5. If you use xhtml or HTML 4, your meta tag needs to look like this<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
3. Make sure you set a Character Encoding Filter in your Deployment Descriptor File You have to filter all incoming/outgoing requests through a character encoding filter. This filter is set in your deployment descriptor (web.xml / or the java equivalent WebApplicationInitializer).
WebApplicationInitializer (Java File)
web.xml
4. Set the FreeMarker Character Encoding in configurer and view resolver You also need to make all your FreeMarker files be standard encoded with UTF-8, this is done by setting their properties to UTF-8 in the FreeMarkerConfigurer and the FreeMarkerViewResolver. This is set in your spring application context file (I will only show the Java equivalent as it is the same in the XML file).
Hope this helps you out :)