Problems with UTF-8 encoding, JSP, jQuery, Spring

Question

I have a web app with spring,jsp and jquery in a apache tomcat 6, one jsp page has a form that send the data with a ajax call made whit jquery, to a Spring MultiActionController on my back end.

The problem is with the UTF-8 strings in the form inputs.

I already did the following things:

On my HTML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<%@ taglib prefix="spring" uri="http://www.springframework.org/tags" %>
<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=utf-8" %>
<%@ page language="java" pageEncoding="utf-8"%>

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

On the jquery ajax call:

$.ajaxSetup({ scriptCharset: "utf-8" ,contentType: "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8" });
    $.ajax(
        {
            type: "GET",
            url: "./saveData.action",
            contentType: "charset=utf-8",
            data: { name: $('#name').val(),...

On the tomcat server.xml:

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

On the MultiActionController

public ModelAndView saveData(HttpServletRequest request,HttpServletResponse response) 
    throws ServletException, IOException 
    {
        request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
        String name = request.getParameter("name");

So if in the name parameter I put something like this:

María

in the backend I get

MarÃa.

I already tried all the things that I read about, and I don't know what is the error, thanks for any help :)

Community · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-20 09:12:55Z

16

Everything looks fine until the point that you get the parameter in a variable. It's just your backend which still needs to be configured to use UTF-8. For example, the System.out.println() or the logger where you're sending the retrieved parameter to should also use UTF-8. Or the database where you're storing the retrieved parameter should also use UTF-8. Or the JDBC driver which is interacting with that DB. Or the text file where you're writing the data to. Etcetera.

should be executed before Spring kicks in. It sets the POST request encoding and this will fail whenever Spring determines the request body before executing the action (note that this line has totally no effect on GET requests). Spring has a CharacterEncodingFilter which does exactly that. Register this in your web.xml:

<filter>
    <filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>encoding</param-name>
        <param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>forceEncoding</param-name>
        <param-value>true</param-value>
    </init-param>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

edited Jun 20, 2020 at 9:12

CommunityBot

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answered Aug 24, 2011 at 12:57

BalusC

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3 Comments

h0m3r16 Over a year ago

Thanks BalusC, I changed the DB and also de web.xml and now it works fine :)

kamal Over a year ago

how to add this to web.xml? inside <web-app>...</web-app> tags? because when I did so my project doesnt run succesfully.

user1608132 Over a year ago

I was having this exact same problem, adding the filter to the xml did the trick. I'm not sure if I have utf-8 installed on my dev server but I am manually converting to unicode.

danny.lesnik · Accepted Answer · 2011-08-24 08:17:53Z

2

I had the same problem from with Characters and I solved it the following way:

request.setCharacterEncoding("utf-8");
                StringBuffer requestContent = new StringBuffer();
                do
                {
                    bytesRead = request.getInputStream().readLine(bytes,0,bytes.length);
                    if(bytesRead > 0)
                    {
                        requestContent.append(new String(bytes,0,bytesRead,"UTF-8"));
                    }
                }
                while(bytesRead > 0);

and then fetch from requestContent your string started with "name="

answered Aug 24, 2011 at 8:17

danny.lesnik

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1 Comment

BalusC Over a year ago

The request.setCharacterEncoding() has totally no effect on GET requests. The request.getInputStream() returns nothing on GET requests. It's the URIEncoding in Tomcat's <Connector> which counts for GET requests. That's already been set properly. Still then, your proposed approach is a workaround, not a solution.

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