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Tomcat will use ISO-8859-1 as the default character encoding of the entire URL, including the query string ("GET parameters") (though see Tomcat 8 notice below).

There are two ways to specify how GET parameters are interpreted:

1. Set the URIEncoding attribute on the <Connector> element in server.xml to something specific (e.g. URIEncoding="UTF-8").
2. Set the useBodyEncodingForURI attribute on the <Connector> element in server.xml to true. This will cause the Connector to use the request body's encoding for GET parameters.
   

In Tomcat 8 starting with 8.0.0 (8.0.0-RC3, to be specific), the default value of URIEncoding attribute on the <Connector> element depends on "strict servlet compliance" setting. The default value (strict compliance is off) of URIEncoding is now UTF-8. If "strict servlet compliance" is enabled, the default value is ISO-8859-1.

References: Tomcat 7 HTTP Connector, Tomcat 7 AJP Connector, Tomcat 8 HTTP Connector, Tomcat 8 AJP Connector

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