1. JSP pages must include the header:
<%@ page
contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"
%>
2. In the Catalina.bat (windows) catalina.sh (windows) apache$jakarta_config.com (OpenVMS), file there must be a switch added to the call to java.exe. The switch is:
-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
I cannot find documentation for this environment variable anywhere or what it actually does but it is essential.
3. For translation of inputs coming back from the browser there must be a method that translates from the browser's ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. It seems to me that -1 is used in all regions as I have had people in countries such as Greece & Bulgaria test this and they always send input back in -1 encoding. The method which you will use constantly should go something like this:
/**
- Convert ISO8859-1 format string (which is the default sent by IE
Wiki Markup to the UTF-8 format that the database is in. */ public String toUTF8(String isoString) \{ String utf8String = null; if (null != isoString && !isoString.equals("")) \{ try \{ byte\[\] stringBytesISO = isoString.getBytes("ISO-8859-1"); utf8String = new String(stringBytesISO, "UTF-8"); \} catch(UnsupportedEncodingException e) \{ // As we can't translate just send back the best guess. System.out.println("UnsupportedEncodingException is: " +
e.getMessage());
utf8String = isoString;
}
}
else
{
utf8String = isoString;
}
return utf8String;
}
I have found that these three steps are all that is necessary to make your site accept any language that UTF-8 can work with. I extend my thanks to those of you on the Tomcat users list who helped me find these little gems.
(from the tomcat-user mailing list) Describe Tomcat/UTF-8 here.