UTF-8 encoding issue with Thymeleaf Spring MVC

Question

I have issue with UTF-8 characters. I've tried many solutions, but nothing is working for me. What I have right now:

• Tomcat (server.xml):

  <Connector URIEncoding="UTF-8" useBodyEncodingForURI="true" connectionTimeout="20000" port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" redirectPort="8443"/>
  

• Base configuration class:

  public class HomeInitializer extends AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer {
  @Override
  protected Class<?>[] getRootConfigClasses() {
      return new Class[] { WebSecurityConfig.class };
  }
  @Override
  protected Class<?>[] getServletConfigClasses() {
      return new Class[] { WebMvcConfiguration.class };
  }
  @Override
  protected String[] getServletMappings() {
      return new String[] { "/" };
  }
  @Override
  protected Filter[] getServletFilters() {
      CharacterEncodingFilter filter = new CharacterEncodingFilter();
      filter.setEncoding("UTF-8"); // forcing UTF-8
      filter.setForceEncoding(true);
      return new Filter[] { filter };
  }
  }
  

• WebMvcConfiguration class which contains Thymeleaf configuration:

  @Bean
  public ThymeleafViewResolver viewResolver() {
      ThymeleafViewResolver viewResolver = new ThymeleafViewResolver();
      viewResolver.setTemplateEngine(templateEngine());
      viewResolver.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8"); // forcing UTF-8
      viewResolver.setContentType("text/html; charset=UTF-8");
      viewResolver.setOrder(1);
      viewResolver.setViewNames(new String[] { ".html", ".xhtml" });
      return viewResolver;
  }
  @Bean
  public SpringResourceTemplateResolver templateResolver() {
      SpringResourceTemplateResolver templateResolver = new SpringResourceTemplateResolver();
      templateResolver.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8"); // forcing UTF-8
      templateResolver.setApplicationContext(applicationContext);
      templateResolver.setPrefix("/WEB-INF/views/");
      templateResolver.setSuffix(".html");
      templateResolver.setTemplateMode(TemplateMode.HTML);
      templateResolver.setCacheable(true);
      return templateResolver;
  }
  @Bean
  public SpringTemplateEngine templateEngine() {
      SpringTemplateEngine templateEngine = new SpringTemplateEngine();
      templateEngine.setTemplateResolver(templateResolver());
      templateEngine.setEnableSpringELCompiler(true);
      return templateEngine;
  }
  @Override
  public void configureViewResolvers(ViewResolverRegistry registry) {
      ThymeleafViewResolver resolver = new ThymeleafViewResolver();
      resolver.setTemplateEngine(templateEngine());
      registry.viewResolver(resolver);
  }
  

• WebSecurityConfig which contains the rest of the configuration:

  @Override
  protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
      http.authorizeRequests().anyRequest().anonymous().antMatchers("/login**", "/*.js", "/*.css", "/*.svg").permitAll().anyRequest().authenticated()
                      .antMatchers("/login**").permitAll().and().formLogin().loginPage("/login").loginProcessingUrl("/login").usernameParameter("username")
                      .passwordParameter("password").defaultSuccessUrl("/", true).permitAll().and().logout()
                      .logoutRequestMatcher(new AntPathRequestMatcher("/logout")).logoutSuccessUrl("/login?logout").deleteCookies("JSESSIONID")
                      .invalidateHttpSession(true).permitAll();
      CharacterEncodingFilter filter = new CharacterEncodingFilter();
      filter.setEncoding("UTF-8"); // another forcing UTF-8
      filter.setForceEncoding(true);
      http.addFilterBefore(filter, CsrfFilter.class);
  }
  

• all html pages contain:

  <meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=UTF-8' />
  

• before I've added Thymeleaf and used jsp I've been able to display special characters

• also checked that all files (.html) are encoded with UTF-8
• Eclipse settings changed to keep everything in UTF-8
• checked probably all answers on stackoverflow related to this issue and verified all higher ranked answers (including this, this and that)
• checked Thymeleaf messaging solution (some stack question for that)
• escaped characters \u0119 are displayed as they are - \u0119
• created new project with same pom.xml, Spring/Thymeleaf configuration

And still instead of polish ąęłźżńłó I have ???????ó displayed on page. Any ideas?

Unfortunatelly I don't have web.xml and whole configuration uses annotations. I can't control Filter classes order - see can use @Order annotation

Used technologies: Spring Framework 5.1.6, Spring Security 5.1.5, Thymeleaf 3.0.11, Thymeleaf Spring security4 3.0.4, Maven 4, Tomcat 9.

Answer 1

Unfortunatelly I have to answer my own question.

To read UTF-8 data from properties file, just use encoding property

@Component
@PropertySource(value = "classpath:config/data.properties", encoding = "UTF-8")

basically what helped was adding some additional method calls to the configureViewResolvers method:

    @Override
    public void configureViewResolvers(ViewResolverRegistry registry) {
        ThymeleafViewResolver resolver = new ThymeleafViewResolver();
        resolver.setTemplateEngine(templateEngine());
        resolver.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8"); // <- this was added
        resolver.setForceContentType(true); // <- this was added
        resolver.setContentType("text/html; charset=UTF-8"); // <- this was added
        registry.viewResolver(resolver);
    }

and additionaly in configure(HttpSecurity http) method I've changed the way how filter is added to this:

    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {

        CharacterEncodingFilter filter = new CharacterEncodingFilter();
        filter.setEncoding("UTF-8");
        filter.setForceEncoding(true);

        http.authorizeRequests().anyRequest().anonymous()
        .antMatchers("/login**", "/*.js", "/*.css", "/*.svg" ).permitAll()
        // ... some other config
        .invalidateHttpSession(true)
        .permitAll()
        .and()
        .addFilterBefore(filter, CsrfFilter.class); // <- this was added
    }

Answer 2

So this might seem very remedial, but have you navigated to the directory structure, right clicked the folder containing your pages, and selecting refresh?

I don't know what IDE you're using, but in the past I have had to manually go into Eclipse and refresh the package containing the static content.

If you don't do this, it won't pick up on the changes.