UTF-8 encoding with Spring Boot 1.1.1

Question

How can I "say" Spring Boot to use the UTF-8 encoding, to show and save German umlauts correctly? We are programming a Java-Webapplication using Sping-Boot 1.1.1 (Release) and as webserver a TomCat7 or Jetty. The database is postgresql or h2 for testing.

Edit:

I tried it with the properties file (thanks for the answer), but no changes are visible.

The database is also UTF-8... Especially the problem comes, when we send a POST-Request to the Webserver. The Spring-Request-Handler gets already the broken encoded values. In the following you can see a part of the code: (It shows a snippet of the Thymeleaf-Template)

<form accept-charset="utf-8" method="post">
        <div class="row">
            <fieldset th:object="${model}">
                <!-- CSRF token -->
                <th:block th:replace="makros :: csrf" />
                <div class="col-sm-4 form-group" >
                    <label for="firstname" th:text="#{edit_user.first_name}">Given Name</label>
                    <input class="form-control required" type="text" required="required" id="firstname" name="firstname" th:field="*{firstName}" />
                </div>
                <div class="col-sm-4 form-group">
                    <label for="firstname" th:text="#{edit_user.last_name}">Family Name</label>
                    <input class="form-control required" type="text" required="required" id="lastname" name="lastname" th:field="*{lastName}" />
                </div>
            </fieldset>
        </div>
 </form>

And this is the request handler for that:

@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.POST)
public String handleUserUpdate(@ModelAttribute(MODEL) UpdateUserCommand command) {
   //here we cut the broken encoded values
}

Greetings Stef

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 14 '15 at 21:32

5

This helped:

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/securitydb?useUnicode=yes&characterEncoding=UTF-8

answered Sep 14 '15 at 21:32

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1

Both this *and* `server.tomcat.uri-encoding=UTF-8` worked. One to prevent corruption in the DB and one to prevent corruption when submitting UTF. – Chloe Jan 14 '19 at 22:32

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 13 '14 at 05:34

What is wrongly encoded? The request or the response? server.tomcat.uri-encoding is switching the URI decoding to UTF-8 (this is already the case for Jetty).

But that does not do anything for the request body. By default, Spring MVC decodes that with ISO-8859-1 (that is the default per the servlet spec). You need to specify a body encoding in your request if you want it to be decoded using UTF-8. Most users are actually using the CharacterEncodingFilter to achieve the same thing (and ensure consistency).

If that fixes your issue, watch out for #1182 that is meant to provide an auto-configuration for that.

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 10 '14 at 08:40

The latest should be UTF-8 by default I think? See docs on server.tomcat.uri-encoding: http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/#common-application-properties. OTOH it might depend on where you need the encoding to happen (Spring Boot knows nothing about your database server encoding for instance).

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 22 '15 at 22:19

You can set UTF-8 as default encoding for spring-boot-maven-plugin. I create 2 maven profile to run spring boot in UTF-8 and set active spring profile via maven profile:

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>dev</id>
        <activation>
            <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
        </activation>
        <build>
            <plugins>
                <plugin>
                    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                    <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                    <configuration>
                        <jvmArguments>-Dfile.encoding=UTF8 -Dspring.profiles.active="dev"</jvmArguments>
                    </configuration>
                </plugin>
            </plugins>
        </build>
    </profile>
    <profile>
        <id>prod</id>
        <build>
            <plugins>
                <plugin>
                    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                    <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                    <configuration>
                        <jvmArguments>-Dfile.encoding=UTF8</jvmArguments>
                    </configuration>
                </plugin>
            </plugins>
        </build>
    </profile>
</profiles>

And run

mvn spring-boot:run for dev profile (application-dev.properties) and

mvn -P prod spring-boot:run for application.properties

UTF-8 encoding with Spring Boot 1.1.1

4 Answers4