Why is my Java/Spring/Tomcat stack translating non English characters into two separate characters?

Question

When I visit the URL http://localhost:8080/myapp/search?q=jalape%C3%B1os&p=1 and use request.getParamter("q") the string becomes jalapeños instead of jalapeños. Obviously this is a problem.

I'm running Spring 3 with tomcat, everything "says" it's coming through as UTF8; which means it should be rendering as jalapeños.

Help?!

Answer 1

Check the tomcat's encoding. According to the Servlet spec (see http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/FAQ/CharacterEncoding) the default one is not UTF-8, but ISO-8859-1

Also take a look at http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/FAQ/CharacterEncoding#Q3 . This might well solve your issues.

Answer 2

You need to configure tomcat something like this

<Connector port="8080" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
 maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
 enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100"
 connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true" 
 compression="on" 
 compressionMinSize="128" 
 noCompressionUserAgents="gozilla, traviata" 
 compressableMimeType="text/html,text/xml,text/plain,text/css,text/ javascript,application/x-javascript,application/javascript"
 URIEncoding="UTF-8"
/>

Note: URIEncoding UTF8

Also See

• encoding-problem-in-servlet

Answer 3

The only reason possible is a UTF8 misconfiguration in your software chain.

Recheck :
- Server configuration for this host - Spring configuration - Java Config for the web application - And of course your meta data in the head of the webpage :

<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />