Bad encoding when returning a string using Spring MVC & ajax

Question

I have a web page that requests an hebrew string using Ajax but the string is returned as '??????'

The weird thing is that when inserting that same string to the page using JSTL and not Ajax, it is shown correctly...

In my web page I'm declaring

<%@ page contentType="text/html" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>

That's my controller:

@RequestMapping("get_label")   
public @ResponseBody String getLabel()
{
   String str = "בדיקה";

   return str;
}

And my ajax request:

$.ajax({
    url:    "get_label",
    success:    function(result)
    {
        alert(result);
        $("#parameter_select label").text(result);
    }
});

Any ideas what am I doing wrong here?

n1ckolas · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-05 09:01:06Z

15

This happens because AJAX-calls by default use browser's default encoding (f.e. ANSI). For overriding this you need to do:

jQuery style - mimeType:

$.ajax({
    url:    "get_label",
    mimeType:"text/html; charset=UTF-8",
    success:    function(result)
    {
        alert(result);
        $("#parameter_select label").text(result);
    }
});

Vanilla JS style:

xhr.overrideMimeType("text/html; charset=UTF-8")

But from the other hand you need to be sure, that server also returns appropriate response. For this you need to check the following:

Add UTF-8 support for web-container (i.e. Tomcat) with adding URIEncoding="UTF-8" for your Connector settings in server.xml; check this for more information.
If previous change didn't help (though it has to), please also make sure, that servlet response's character set is also UTF-8.

For this you can use either explicit call of method:

@RequestMapping("get_label")
public @ResponseBody String getLabel(HttpServletResponse response)
{
    String str = "בדיקה";

    //set encoding explicitly
    response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");

    return str;
}

Or, which seems to be more preferable for @ResponseBody and Spring 3.1+:

@RequestMapping(value = "get_label", produces = "text/html; charset=UTF-8")
public @ResponseBody String getLabel(HttpServletResponse response)
{
    String str = "בדיקה";

    return str;
}

As a conclusion I would like to clarify, that for proper handling of AJAX-calls with UTF-8 encoding, you have to make sure, that:

web-container supports this properly
response's character encoding is UTF-8
AJAX request character encoding is also UTF-8

edited Mar 5, 2013 at 9:01

answered Mar 4, 2013 at 15:40

n1ckolas

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5 Comments

n1ckolas Over a year ago

For testing purposes please consider clearing browser's caches as JS is cached quite well.

n1ckolas Over a year ago

If it didn't help, then issue should be on the server-side. In this case could you please provide: 1) your spring version; 2) your web-container

koela1 Over a year ago

I'm using spring version 3.1.3 and Tomcat 7

koela1 Over a year ago

Amazing! It works! Thanks :) I added - produces = "text/html; charset=UTF-8" - and that did it

n1ckolas Over a year ago

Great, that I managed to help you. But in any case, I would suggest not remove at least AJAX part with mimeType

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